Empire: World History - 87. Tolstoy: War and the Russian Empire

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

Tolstoy was one of the greatest writers of all time. His books have constructed how we think about Russian imperial history. But he was not just an observer, he was also a participant. As a young man, Tolstoy fought in several of Russia's imperial wars– against the Chechens and the Ottoman Turks, then against both the French and the British in the Crimea. As he matured he grew far more critical of Russian Empire building and lamented the futility of war and conquest. His writings were a driver of the growing disillusionment with tsarism, and he began to be censored by the regime. So great was his influence that Lenin himself wrote about his role in the Russian Revolution. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Tolstoy's biographer Rosamund Bartlett to unpick this remarkable life. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill + Tabby Syrett Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. We have done a simultaneous fan moment, haven't we? Because both you and I have slightly fallen in love with both, subject matter and indeed guest superstar this week, haven't we?

Absolutely. I think both of us had, I never, you went to Russia and your youth, which I never did, but I sat in places like Rome and my first trip around India with war and peace in those buses. Yes, I know. And also, you know, the subject matter, particularly this week has. You're quite right throwing me back into just being sort of a slightly dipty student. But the joy of reading about Tolstoy. because honestly I didn't know as much

and I didn't realise how much I'd be drawn into him and his life and also I sort of had many of the same feelings I felt when we were doing the Gandhi episode which was that there is a whole hinterland here which you need to kind of understand to understand the thinking and the transformation of a great life and as we will find of course it links very closely bags of hush

Bags of Hush now. Anyway, we should introduce our superstar, who we were completely Gaga over this week. Rosamund Bartlett is, well, the author of the great book that we're basing the podcast on today, Tolstoy, a Russian life. But she's not just that. She's a translator, a translator of great esteem. She has done the latest and, dare I say, greatest translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World Classics Edition. And she is very welcome on Empire. Hello. Hello. Hello, very nice to be here. We were very, very lucky to have Rosambert Butler to our Jaipur Literature Festival when her Tolstoy biography first came out. And she gave a barnstorming performance that I remember thinking was by far the greatest at the festival. And it was just so exciting to have you.

But how wonderful now to have you back. I hope you can remember it all. It's what 10 years since you wrote that book? Absolutely, yes. I have to say that. I read it when you came to Jaipo and reading it again this week. It hasn't aged at all. If anything, it's become more pertinent.

There's so many of the issues that you throw up absolutely of the moment this weekend. It was extraordinary reading it now. You call it a Russian life. And there is something so quintessential about the interweaving of one man and the history of a country. Just tell us why Tolstoy is so very totemic when it comes to looking at Russia and Russian history. Well, he had a life that was very long for a start. So he lived during the reign of four SARS. all of whom he wrote to personally, he felt himself very equal to him.

And he was by common consent, Russia's greatest prose writer. So the two greatest novels that he wrote, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are by common sense these days, you know, two of the greatest novels in world literature. We should say at this point, if there is any person listening to this podcast out there that has not yet read, War and Bees or Anna Greta, they are known as the world's two greatest novels for very, very, very good reasons. And you need to go, as well as buying Rosamond's wonderful biography, you need to buy both those novels and read the nigh. They are the greatest reading experiences certainly in my life and many other people I know share that feeling. All right, Professor.

Well, there'll be a detention. It sounded particularly finger-waggy, if I may say. Sorry, Rosamond, you were saying. So on that basis alone, he's a take it, he's a, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, He's one of the greatest Russians. But he was much more than that because he actually spent longer than he was a professional novelist being a thorn in the Russian imperial government side. And he ended up at the end of his life being really the nation's moral leader. And his influence carried on after 1917 and probably would still be relevant today if Stalinism happened.

So he's just a hugely important figure. He's an alternative version in many ways of what Russia could easily have been. The revolution was not inevitable in the form it took, certainly, was it? No, he was someone who was regarded as an influential thinker on a par with Marx. I mean, that seems hard to imagine now, but that was the case in 1917. Lenin very famously wrote an article on the 80th anniversary. of Tolstoy's great life when he was 80 years old, left Tolstoy as a mirror of the Russian Revolution.

And he had a lot of time for Tolstoy because he was doing a lot of good work trying to undermine the government and pull it down. But he didn't agree with the non-violent approach that Tolstoy championed and Tolstoy was a vegetarian. So the thing with the situation in the 1920s, of course, that Lenin had decreed that every word by Tolstoy should be published. And so Stalin was obliged to start publishing the 90-volume collected works.

And, you know, maybe this is not the time to go into it. But the whole history of that edition is very interesting. And his religious writings were only printed in a very small print rhyme once to cut a long story. Well, I mean, we're going to start digging into the life and times of the man himself. but William will burst out of his seat if we don't like the thing that I made him, but you said sort of vegetarianism and nonviolence. That sounds like another fellow we know quite well on this podcast. And there is a connection, a direct connection between Tolstoy and Gandhi, isn't there? Absolutely. Tolstoy's magnum opus in terms of his spiritual writings was a work called The Kingdom of God is Within You.

and by the time that he wrote it, he had an incredibly sophisticated operation disseminating his writings abroad because he was censored. He was a Samizdat author. He was like a sort of Soviet dissident. And they were all published abroad and then smuggled back into Russia. But so sophisticated was this operation that there were several translations that reached far corners of the world, including South Africa, where there was a young lawyer called Mahandos Gandhi. who read it and was absolutely struck down by it, and it changed his life and his whole approach to solving the problems in India. I open my book, The Anarchy, with Tolstoy's letter to Gandhi,

when he talks about the East Indy Company, a company that enslaved 5 million people, or was it 50 million people, whatever the figure was. Yes, very important. And here's another titbit, because we like tidbits, and then we really are going to get dug in. But Garne was so taken by Tolstoy and Tolstoy's writing that the farm, You know, this ashram that he creates in South Africa. They call it Tolstoy Farm.

So, I mean, you know, it's just embedded there. And one other thing before we dive into his life and start. We promise we will. It's the longest preamble in history. Go on. Last thing is the fact that Tolstoy is probably the greatest writer on the Russian Empire and on Russian imperialism, on the expansion of Russia Southwood. I don't think that he was necessarily writing about it, but he was.

I mean, his intentions were sort of often other, but he certainly wrote very, very much in detail about his time in the army. And Hajimurat at the end, which is one of my favourite novellas of all time. Well, let's not bust that balloon because we're going to come to it. Can we start with the origin story, as we always like to do on this podcast? Where was he born? How is he made? What is Tolstoy at the beginning? So Lev Nikolivich Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the reign of Nicholas I, three years after the

Decemberst uprising, which would later play a role in his own life and career. And he was born deep in the Russian countryside south of Moscow near the city of Tula, which was a famous place for making arms, as it happens. There was incredible ironworks there where they produced guns. And he was born into the Russian gentry. So he was already born Count Tolstoy. And the Russian for Count is Graf. And this is a title that was imported by Peter the Great in the 18th century

when he was modernizing Russia. And he imported these European titles. So Graf is a German word. German title, exactly. That's exactly that, Graf. Same in Russian and Baron. So he wasn't the sort of highest echelon of the Russian aristocracy. He wasn't a prince or a grand duke or anything like that, but he was still very much of the high

ranks of the nobility. And he came from a distinguished lineage. We've come across one of his ancestors in our episode on Peter the Great. Yes. You've just preempted me. So that's Pietra Andrevich, who was very high ranking with Peter the Great, yes, and, you know, served in Europe and was one of the first people in Russia to shave his beard and wear Western. dressed and then was dispatched to get back the errant heir to the throne.

He was then horribly tortured and murdered. Absolutely. And then he was someone who had a lot of ambition and he was sort of jockeying for power and was angling for Peter's daughter to become empress after Peter's death and was then arrested by Menchikov and exiled to Salafki, the Salavetsky Islands, which later had a notorious concentration camp. So let's talk about Artaelstein. Would we have liked him? Was he a good bloke as a young man? He would have been immensely attractive, but very difficult. He had a great propensity for rubbing people up the wrong way all the way through his life, except probably at the end when he was sort of consistently going on about his spiritual ideas.

But as a young man, he became an orphan at the age of seven. His mother died before he was two. His father died seven. And so the Tolstoy children were packed off to Kazan to be brought up by their aunt and uncle. And that meant that, yes, he didn't really have maybe that sort of paternal discipline that might have instilled him in him some sort of ideas about how to sort of live. Because the minute he became adult, he started sort of gambling wildly. Yeah, he goes on the lash in Kazat, doesn't he? He was very, very effectless. So there's a sort of, I don't know that he was incredibly self-conscious too because he didn't feel he was as good looking as some of the other labels.

Yeah, no, we have to quickly get this for Anita. She's always very keen to get a visual portrait of our heroes. Somebody on Twitter said, what we learn from listening to Empire is that Williams related to somebody in every episode in history, and Anita's boy mad. Okay, so yes, I do, I do like to know. I didn't see that, do you? Yes, yes. He was more of a looker in old age, wasn't he?

He looked great with his beard and his. as this sort of fantastic old sage at the end, but he's got a kind of rather sort of nobly face as a young man. Yes, and a rather sort of large nose. I mean, he looks a little bit like a Russian peasant. I mean, that's another reason why he's such a sort of totem for Russia. But he had this aristocratic bearing, and he is a supreme man of contradictions told story.

So he was sort of, you know, a bundle of opposites. And so that's why I think he would have confounded a lot of his contemporaries, because he didn't actually behave like the rest of the Russian nobility, who were very, very conservative for the most part. He was always swimming against the current. He was an outsider from an early age. But to quote himself about his youth in Kazan, crude, dissolute living in the service of ambition, vanity, and above all lust.

Tell us about that. Well, I think so. He lost his virginity when he was a teenager in Kazan. I think when he was 14 and happened to start his literary career by writing the first diary entry in the venereal diseases clinic. And the other thing, of course, is that he dropped out of university. He couldn't sustain his interest. He didn't like authority. That is one of the really important things to note about Tolstab.

that, you know, no one was someone he really looked up to except Jesus at the end of his life. And even then, he sort of rather fashioned Jesus around his own ideal. So we know he liked sex, did not like authority as a young man. Where did the love of letters begin? I mean, did he grow up in a household that was steeped in learning? And tell us about the blind storyteller. I was really very taken by that, the family's blind storyteller. Yeah, well, you know, the Russian aristocracy had this wonderful sort of, you know, literary,

atmosphere. So the writers, you know, meant a great deal. And, you know, Tolstoy grew up in this ancestral home in Yasna, Palliana, clear glade in the, in the middle of the countryside, this lovely classical mansion, and there was a great library there. And both of his parents had been extremely well read. So he sort of absorbed all that. Okay, but learned. I mean, he is learned from the start, and he has a love of words and fashioning words, and even the diary entries sort of show that this is a man who can write, even sort of at the earliest points he can write. Well, he begins very early on a lifelong journey to submit his own consciousness to sort of psychological analysis. In a way, his whole life becomes a kind of literary project and really

everything that's going on with all his novels. He's examining himself, which is why I was very understanding of the recent version of Uncle Vanya in which Andrew Scott played all the characters, because of course, you know, there is some sort of logic to that, particularly with Tolstoy. So as a result of this, you know, this supreme intelligence, he's wanting to articulate consciousness and process. And so inevitably, yes, he starts developing his literary skills. and Rousseau in particular, I think, is a very important thing of that. And the blind storyteller. We can't not listen.

Oh, so the blind story, yes, absolutely. So when he was a little boy, he would sometimes be in the bedroom when his grandmother was getting undressed. And she was able to get undressed in front of the serf who would tell her fairy tales at night because he was blind. And there was a whole tradition for noble families to employ blind. storytellers. Full enough, in India, too, the Mughals used to go to bed with storytellers reading stories to them at epics through a screen. Yes.

And in, you know, in Ukraine, too, there was this great tradition of cobsars, these bards, who would, who would, you know, be blind as well. So Tolstoy was sort of absolutely spellbound by being able to listen to these stories. And, of course, that instilled in him a great love for Russian culture. and this is in an era before folklore began to be really appreciated. There's a lovely letter you quote when he leaves. How do I pronounce it, Yazna Paliana? Yasna Paliana.

Yasna Pollyana. He leaves his estate and he goes to St. Petersburg. And the young Tolstoy is this sort of hopeless, gambler, dissolute. And this is your translation, I presume, of a letter, but I love it. I imagine you're already saying, he writes to his brother, Sergei, that I'm the most empty-headed fellow. and you will be telling the truth. God knows what I've gone and done.

I set off for no reason to Petersburg, did nothing worthwhile there, just spent a heap of money and got into debt. It's stupid, unbelievably stupid. You won't believe how much it's tormenting me. The main thing are the debts which I have to pay as soon as possible, because if I don't pay them soon, I'll lose my reputation on top of the money.

Is that very much teenage toll story? Well, that is. He had no idea what to do with himself. He had this incredible intellectual energy, but he had no idea how to channel it. So at one point he was thinking he was going to join up and go to the army, then he wanted to be a diplomat, and then he wanted to go back and hear the gypsies sing,

and he was gambling like all great Russians, and he found himself having to get his steward to flog off one of his estates, to pay his debts. And in fact, eventually, in fact it was actually during the Crimea war, he ended up selling his ancestral home. Look, I mean, we'll get to the war in a minute because, you know, selling off one estate is not enough for the debts that he's accrued. He does end up, you know, eventually bouncing himself into the army in 1851. I mean, is that largely due to the debts that he'd accrued that in the army, he might be able to pay them off or escape. I don't know. We've read so many things before for this podcast where people have escaped into the army to escape creditors largely because they don't think they'll follow them to the front. But is this for money or just to have a little bit of headspace? while you sort yourself out? No, it was a completely random thing.

And I think it's very illicitive of the way in which Tolstoy lived without really very much purpose. So his elder brother and all the brothers worshipped Nikolai the eldest. He'd gone off and done his duty to serve in the army, become an officer and was serving down in the Caucasus. And he came back to visit Tolstoy one day. And Tolstoy had nothing better to do. And he hadn't made any plans at all.

he just on a whim decided he was just going to go off with him. And that was just another adventure. So he went off without thinking he was going to join up, in fact. He just went to enjoy himself, which he did. And that's where, of course, he started writing fiction, but also decided that he would serve as well. And, you know, there was no obligation for the nobility to serve, but there was this feeling of honour.

And he wanted glory at that point. He did have a lot of vanity. he ends up in the Caucasus. Tell us about him arriving in Chechnya. So he's in an incredibly beautiful part of the world. So for the Russian soldiers and officers who left Moscow and Petersburg, which is largely flat, suddenly they were in this sort of wild west of Russia. And, you know, Russia had been fighting this colonial war ever since Catherine the Great had annexed Georgia and there were all these tribes in the mountains who were doing their best to stop that happening. And Tolstoy arrived in the Caucasus at a rather sort of late point because, of course,

the Russian army had been confronted when they first arrived in the Caucasus. They sort of couldn't really execute traditional battle plans because they weren't fighting on the flat and they were fighting guerrillas. And so Count Michael Varansov, who was the leader, then devised this policy of just raising the forests to expose these fighters. We're going to take a break soon. But just before we do, tell us about the real Haji Murat, who is the inspiration for one of his last, but arguably his greatest novella. Well, he was one of the Chechen rebel leaders who falls out with another leader, Imam Shamil and sort of goes over to the other side, as it were. He goes over to the Russians. And Shamil has captured Hachimurad's family. And so he's sort of wanting to get revenge.

And in the end, he meets a rather dastardly end because the Russians, they just betray him, don't they? And he's murdered. It's a great, great piece of writing. It's an incredible piece of writing, which many people regard as Tolstoy's greatest short story, some of his greatest writing in general. Some people would say it was the greatest short story ever written. I would go with that. And what is important is that Tolstoy started it.

The whole idea came from his earliest experiences with the army down in the Caucasus, but he was still tinkering with this story long after he'd abdured the writing of fiction. And he only ever wrote fiction in the 1880s and 90s and onwards to preach a moral idea. and here he was writing a piece of great, great literature. And of course, but his later ideas impinge on it because he comes down very heavily on the idea of Russian imperialism and the whole idea of government. You write at the beginning of your great biography, Rosamund,

that today the Chechens admire Tolstoy for making friends of them during his time in the Caucasus and that this was highly unusual for Russian officers who tended to treat the natives with contempt. Do you tell us about that? Yes. I think that's something actually quite important that really distinguishes Tolstoy from other writers. So someone like Leibntov had gone down to the Caucasus and died in a duel down there.

In the place where Tolstoy was living in the same time. Absolutely, yes. And there was this sort of lack of interest, a complete absence of interest in the locals. And what distinguishes Tolstoy, who is a realist writer from Leibentov, who was a sort of great romantic writer, is that Tolstoy actually sort of leads amongst them. and being the contrary person that he is, he sympathises and identifies with the Cossacks because they're freedom lovers,

and they're very independent, and the women have a role as well. And so he writes with such sympathy that, of course, the Chechens today revere him for his great service to them. Well, it's a good point to take a break. Join us after the break where we find out more about the developing

psyche and career of Tolstoy. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Hajimurad, in which Tolstoy is showing himself to be something of a unique thinker, doing something that people don't do at that time, which is sympathising with the enemy, opening his eyes to the fact that things are not binary, black and white, and the, you know, the imperial Russia is not always right. Impossible, for example, to imagine a British author in East India Company, India at the same time, projecting himself into the, into Tipuseltan's mind or something.

That's a very interesting point, yeah. 1853 then. So Tulsa is getting bored now with regimental life, it seems. And he's getting sort of slightly sick of himself. What happens, you know, what happens at this point? Is it the siege of Silistria, which changed? his worldview again? I'm not sure.

His brother Nikolai, whom he'd gone to join, had resigned his commission. We should say this is in modern Romania on the Danube, but we're now moving. We're just about to move there. So Tolstoy actually tries to resign himself, it should be said, but he can't because of the new hostilities that have broken out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. and, yes, in the land of modern Romania largely. And so he is transferred to active duty there. And this is the beginnings of what will, of course, be the Crimean War. And in fact, by the time he eventually arrived out in what is current day, Romania, in Silistria,

the theatre of war has moved to the Crimea, and so he gets transferred again. Before we go, can I just read, there's a wonderful, passage in his diary. No, it's a letter to his aunt. And he writes, beautiful description, the Danube, its islands and its banks, some occupied by us, others by the Turks, so that you could see the town, the fortress, and the little forts of Solistria, as though through the palm of your hand. You could hear the cannon fire and rifle shots, which continued night and day, and with a field glass, you could make out the Turkish soldiers. It's true, it's a funny sort of pleasure to see people killing each other. And yet, every morning and the evening, I would get up on my cart

and spent hours of the time watching and I wasn't the only one. That's a very tall story sort of contradiction, isn't it? Yeah, so even at the end of his life, he was totally fascinated by the whole idea of warfare and battle. It never ceased to interest him as a process. But he was longing to have some sort of active duty. So that's what happens when he finally arrives in Sir Pestepas. He also examines his own bravery or cowardice. He says, it wasn't at all frightening, as might suppose, watching it, although it's close by.

The period that precedes the engagement is the most unpleasant. It's the only period when you have the time to be afraid, and fear is one of the most unpleasant feelings. Towards morning, the nearer the moment came, the more this feeling diminished. And towards three o'clock, we were all waiting to see the shower of rockets let off as the signal for attack. And I was in such good humour that I'd been very upset if someone had come along, tell me this sort, wouldn't take place. You were taking us to Sevastopol, which we've spoken about in two podcasts with Orlando Vigis. He is newly promoted when he arrives at Sevastopol. So tell us what he's doing there.

What is he expecting to see and what does he end up seeing? Well, yes, he's sort of in pursuit of this sort of military honours. And he's still thinking he might get the St. George Cross, which has eluded before. But now, yes, he's serving in the artillery. And he arrives in Sebastopol in November of 1854, and it's been under siege since September. And he's not actually serving actively himself until the following year. So he's there at the end as an observer, really. So he does spend quite a lot of time, both in Silistria and in Sebastopol, just twiddling his thumbs and

playing cards and gambling. Playing the piano too. Playing the piano, that's right. He finds a piano, doesn't he? And it's really only in the early months of 1855 that he gets transferred to active duty. But he's already been wanting to put into words some of the things he's been seeing. And he's really mostly shocked really by what he perceives as a completely different situation amongst the allied forces. So he goes to talk to some of the prisoners of

war in Sebastopol and he sees that they feel they've got an incredible sense of dignity and pride in what their countries are doing, which really, really contrasts very sharply with the morale in the Russian army. Well, I mean, he sort of writes about, I mean, he's there in time to see what is carnage in their hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Incommen. And this is what he writes in his diary. It's worth, worth hearing. It was a treacherous, revolting business, he wrote about this defeat on the 14th of November. The enemy put forward 6,000 riflemen, only 6,000 against 30,000, and we retreated, having lost about 6,000 brave men. And we had to retreat because half our troops had no artillery, owing to the roads being impassable. And God knows why, there were no.

no rifle battalions. It's terrible slaughter. It'll weigh heavy on the souls of many people. Lord, forgive them. The news of this action has produced a sensation. I've seen old men who wept aloud and young men who swore to kill Dannenberg. Great is the moral strength of the Russian people. Many political truths will emerge and evolve in the present difficult days for Russia. The feeling of ardent patriotism that has arisen and issued forth from Russia's misfortunes will long leave traces on her. So this is what he'll put into his pieces of reportage because he plans to try and raise this sense of morale and to try and bring reform. He realizes that Russian army needs reform. And he proposes the idea of producing a forces newspaper. But Nicholas the first, of course,

says no. And just says, oh, you can write for the official newspaper, which of course is no good at all, because they've always had the right to do that. So this is what then drives Tolstoy to start writing, reading fiction. And of course, Nicholas I first dies in February 1855. And this is a hugely important date in the whole of Russian 90th century history because he's ruled Russia with an iron fist for over 25 years. And inevitably, it's a kind of thaw. And so Tolstoy thinks suddenly, right,

that I can sort of put some of my ideas about reform into action, and he thinks he can start writing. So he writes his first piece of repartage from Sebastopol in December, based on what you've just been reading Anita. And it's a very patriotic piece still. But what's so incredible about it is, of course, it's published a few months later in this new climate where the censorship is lifted. And Russian readers have never had a sense of what modern warfare is like. And of course, it's still going on at this stage. So you get this incredible immediacy, if I could just read to you one little paragraph. It's very, very vivid.

It's like sort of watching a film that the whistle close at hand of a shell or a cannonball just at the very moment you start to climb the hill gives you a nastier sensation. Suddenly you realize in an entirely new way the true significance of those sounds of gunfire you heard from the town. Some quiet, happy memory suddenly flickers to life in your brain. you start thinking more about yourself and less about what you observe around you and are suddenly gripped by an unpleasant sense of indecision. That's so tall story. It's a classic case.

But he's actually in great danger, isn't he? He's actually in one of the bastions, which is being most shelled by the Allies. And just to give the figures here, he's in Sebastopol, one of 35,000 Russian defenders. 13,000 of those do not return home are killed in Sebastopol. That's right. So that little passage I just read was based on his observations. But of course, the next instalment of his Sebastopol Torres. Sebastopol in May is written on the basis of his actual experience on the fourth bastion,

which was the most southern point and closest to the Allies. And of course, it was extremely dangerous. Next to the French, who've got the most up-to-date artillery and absolute cutting-edge weaponry. Exactly. And Tolstoy writes this very, very different account of his experiences. And having had the first Sebastopol in December piece published and translated into French at the express demand of Alexander II. And it's made him a celebrity in Russia. He now writes a piece that is completely massacred by the censor because he's already coming out with pacifist views.

And it's very, very chastening for him to realize and to realize that none of his ideas for reforming the army, which of course is an army that is, it's made up of soldiers who are conscripted to fight for 25 years, which is their life. and they're paid a pittance. And Torstoy realizes that the offices are really no more enlightened in terms of leadership. And with Crimea being so far away, he realizes that, you know, serfdom is really holding Russia up. There is a very primitive communication system, and Russia is destined to lose the war. Yeah. I mean, he may have had some of his work sort of massacred, but the stuff that does, you know, get translated into French,

gets into the hands of the Tsarina is said to make her weep. I mean, he is a powerful writer who has a voice now that people are listening to. Yes, well, he's become a celebrity at this point, and his literary powers of bringing people into the moment are completely unparalleled, and his ability also to sort of enter into the thoughts and feelings of other people, whether it's a dying soldier, of course, that's enough to bring the Tsarina to tears. Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about, you know, develop this idea, he sees the serfs as suffering. He sees, you know, it's kind of that led by donkeys mentality. I mean, how does this affect sort of the post-war period of his life? Does he have an idea, a route to making the serf's life better? Is he now more critical of Imperial Russia in a way that is dangerous to Imperial Russia? Yeah, I think the Crimean War is a sort of watershed in Tolst, his life and it changes him irrevocably. And he comes back to St. Petersburg. It makes him

want to get out of the army as soon as he can, which he does. And he arrives in St. Petersburg and of course there's a side to him which wants to go carousing with the gypsy singers again and gamble again. But he's also... He didn't exactly stop carousing even in Sebastopol. There's a few Ukrainian women on the way, aren't there? That's absolutely right. He did. So he hasn't given up his habits yet. But he's also, of course, arriving as a celebrated writer now, and Tegenev is there, his elder contemporary. They have a rather troubled relationship, don't they? And they have a very troubled relationship, because Tolstoy is eminently not clubbable. You know, he doesn't want to fit in, and he will forever have a very fractious relationship with Tegenev.

And he's already acquainted with him and goes to stay in his apartment. Tigenief's a generation older? He's 10 years older. He's 10 years older. And Tigeniaf is too urbane. He's too Western, you know, for Tolstoy. Living in Paris too much. He is.

And he's too much of an artist. Already, this will come out much, much more strongly later on. But already Tolstoy is realizing that they are chalk and cheese. But his sketches from a huntsman's album, which is my favorite, Tegadiev, is one of the early important influences on Tolstoy, isn't it? He's read it as a boy and loves it. Absolutely. This is a selection of stories written in 1852, just a few years earlier. And Tegelyev is extraordinary in actually putting peasants into his fiction.

He's the first Russian writer to treat the peasants as human beings and to give them a dignity. And that is a milestone in Russian letters because Saftum has been this sort of great white elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And now it's very much to the fore. And of course, with the accession of Alexander II and with the Crimea war being such a fiasco for Russia, Alexander realizes that he's got to introduce reforms. And of course, the one great iniquity, the great injustice that's been holding Russia up is Safdum. And so that is the sort of the most important day, 1861. I mean, talking about one difficult relationship between him and,

But let's talk about the other one. Can we talk about Sonia now? I mean, that is a relationship which I'm utterly fascinated with, his wife, who he meets 1862. They sort of get engaged after about a week. She's 16 years younger than him. And he presents her almost immediately after they're married with a diary of all of his sexual history, which is, you know, colourful to say the least. Dairy contains other things as well. But the sexual history. But just tell us about that relationship a little bit more and why did it happen and what was she like? Well, I think today people would probably say that Tolstoy was somewhere on the spectrum. He had some very strange ways of behaving.

So just to go back to the year in which he gets married in 8062, this is the year after the abolition of serfdom and he's been working, teaching peasant children. That's been his huge passion. and suddenly the SARS secret police raid his estate and he's mortally offended and he just, in his mercurial way, like the way he'd gone off to join his brother in the Caucasus, he just drops his schools and decides he's going to get married and meets this young woman who is the daughter of a physician in the Kremlin and within a week he's proposed and they get married shortly thereafter. And for anyone who wants to sort of get a sense of how this evolved, you can do you know better than to read the middle of Anna Karenina where Levin gets married to Kitty because so much of Tolstoy's fiction is inspired.

He's drawing from his own resources. Kitty is his wife. In many respects, she is, yeah. And so, yes, she was half Tolstoy's age. And, of course, she'd never lived in the countryside. And she was chosen by Tolstoy over her elder sister. And she is just very compliant, really. And Tolstoy says, would you like to go abroad for your honeymoon?

And she said, no, no, I'd like to get stuck into, you know, country life. So they head off straight after the wedding for Yasna Paliana. Which he's bought back? I thought he'd sold it off. Well, he never lost the property, but he lost the main house. and it was dismantled brick by brick and rebuilt about 20 kilometres down the road. And he settles instead in the two guest wings, which were either side of this main house. And, you know, he would point to a sort of clump of trees near them and so that's where I was born

because he was born in that manorial house which no longer stood. And of course, that guest wing was expanded over the years because they went on to have many children. So, yeah, Tolstoy brings his wife back to him. his country estate and it was incredibly Spartan. Yes, it's not fancy in the pictures. It's quite a sort of flaky, run-down-looking provincial manor house. Not just that, you know, he didn't believe in having sort of nice linen. And this poor girl...

Yeah, I mean, a little bit like Gandhi, actually, with his own wife, that he suddenly sort of decides, you know, laterally, we're going to sleep on hard surfaces, we're going to have rough clothes to wear, we're not going to have nice things, you know. Does she have much choice in the matter? And do we know what she thinks about all of this? Well, not much at that stage. And there is this incredibly strong ascetic streak in Tolstor. You know, he'd started his Franklin diary, you know, saying I'm going to learn five languages.

I'm going to learn the piano. I'm going to not eat this. I'm not going to drink. And, of course, he was unable to keep up any of his good intentions. But nevertheless, he had this eccentric way of living. He didn't really need very much in the way of fine accoutrements. I mean, he liked books. but Sonia really did soften life there.

And of course, she started having children. And it became a proper family home. Lots of children. I mean, how many children in the end? Well, there were 13. I mean, there were many more pregnancies than that, actually. There were a couple of stillbirths, a lot of tragedy. And so she took over the household,

and she introduced many, many nice, comfortable aspects to living there. Scatter cushions, that kind of thing. things, soft furnishings. Yes, soft furnishings, yes. And made sure that the family ate well. But nevertheless, she was half his age. And he was like a father figure. And he was basically the one who made all the decisions.

The final years of Tolstoy's life, when he's by now falling out with his wife and arguing with her every day, is coming towards the period of 1905 and the great uprisings and challenges to the Zast. Is Tolstoy part of that? Do his writings reflect what's happening, or do they actually move Russia towards a more anti-Zarist critical of autocracy frame of mind? He's very much right at the center of it, and that begins right at the end of Anna Karana in the late 80s, he has a big spiritual crisis and comes out of it very much changed. He starts attacking the Russian Orthodox Church for supporting the government in prosecuting war and starts propounding this philosophy of nonviolence.

He translates the Gospels. And he will keep up this stream of diatribs against the Russian government against autocracy. And he'd begun to be critical of Russian autocracy, you know, even back in Kazan when he was a student. He keeps it up all the way through the... the revolutionary disturbances of 19 and 5 all the way up until his death in 1910. And he is a very influential figure because the Russian government is morally bankrupt. And he is the one speaking the truth. And the more that they try and shut him down, the more the Russians want to believe him.

And he's being widely read. I mean, today we all look at him as arguably the greatest novelist that ever existed. Is he recognized as that during his own lifetime? Well, he's more famous as a kind of philosopher and thinker than he is as a novelist at that point. And it's striking that the first English translations of his novels appear in the middle of the 1880s, that's in England, at the same time as the first translations of his fiction. So Tolstow is far more influential as a sort of thinker, someone who, yeah, by that stage had become vegetarian, he'd given up all his property, he'd given up his title.

Sonia was not at all happy with any of this, was she? No, so Sonia's deeply unhappy, and their marriage, I mean, you know, not to trivialise this, but it is a miserable marriage by the end. And she's now found a voice, I guess, so whereas, you know, she was moldable little Sonia. She's not having this anymore. And the thing that really, really upsets her is that she is sharing him with his acolytes. He's got this sort of band of disciples who seemed to, you know, whatever small solace she might have had of his attention, she doesn't even have that anymore. Just speak a little bit to that

situation and where it leads to, the very famous station ending. Well, it was very difficult for her. She spent 20 years bringing up children in the countryside and Tolstoy could go to Moscow whenever he wanted to see his editors or to do research for war and peace. And she was stuck at home. And by the end of it, she was desperate to have a bit of life. And in the end, in 1880, Tolstoy sort of gives in, he compromises. And the elder children need to go to school and university, and they buy a house in Moscow. It's kind of sort of, you know, compromise with her. And she's able to have a bit of a social life, finally. And it's nice for the elder daughters as Well, but of course, that means that Tolstoy starts encountering urban poverty, and that's what sets

him off on this quest to be a campaigner, a social campaigner. But meanwhile, that means he's no longer there as a father, and he's still having children, even in 1888. And he's writing this, that notorious novella, the Kreuzisicenata, which preaches chastity, at the same time as that he's still having children. And for Tolstoy's wife, of course, it's very difficult because she's still got to be there as a mother bringing up the children. So she still needs to pay the bills. And it's all very well for Tolstoy to give up, you know, earning money from his writing, but she's got to somehow feed the children. Take us to the railway station. So I want to take you further on. So that's the situation which really goes on all the way up until 1910. And it gets so acrimonious

in the end that Tolstoy vows to leave. So here. His greatest acolyte is a very, very imperious aristocrat called Ladimia Chetkoff. And he's been exiled to England in 1897. Lenin got exiled to Siberia, but because Chetkoff was an aristocrat, he got to England. And he sort of managed the whole sort of Tolstoy enterprise and then comes back in 1908 and basically moves into Yasna Paliana. Of course, Sonia finds it very, very hard. She's been married to Tolstoy for getting on for 15. years and suddenly she's been supplanted in, you know, in husband's affections by this, by this man

whose whole existence runs contrary to everything she stands for. And so he finally manages to run away at night and gets on a train hoping to, well, he says, you know, to live in great solitude, but he's such a contradictory figure. But of course he falls ill. He goes to see his sister, who's become a nun by this stage. She's the last member of the family he sees. And at the little station of Astap of her, he falls ill. And he is cared for by his followers. In the ticket office?

In the station master's cottage, yes. And that's where he dies. With Sonia outside, trying to look through the ticket window. Yeah, she's there as well. She's trying to sort of get in. She's trying to get at him. But also a lot of press is there as well, which is sort of makes the whole, isn't that right?

And it makes the whole thing just, you know, an awkward, ignominious, as far from peaceful passing as you could hope to have. Because he's a worldwide celebrity at this. He's been so successful at disseminating his writings around the world. And film has arrived. So there are film crews there. Yeah, crazy. Yes.

And the Russian government is trying desperately to sort of hush everything up because he's such an inflammatory figure. He's so powerful. He's been excommunicated by this stage. And that's only really enhanced his moral authority in the Russian population. So he dies there. And they do their best to stop anyone going to his funeral. So he's buried in Yasna Paliano and his ancestral home.

And it's the first civil burial, of course, because he's been excommunicated. And it doesn't stop his great power amongst the Russian populace. And during World War I, there are thousands and thousands of Russian soldiers who just basically abandoned the front because they are inspired by Tolstoy's ideas. And if it hadn't been for the Bolshevik coup, I'm sure probably he would have been more influential in the following years. Where does he stand in Russia today? Well, that's a really good question because when I published my biography in 2010, I went to Rastopova. I was really curious to see how this anniversary, the the hundred years since his death were being treated in the media.

And it was a big event around the world. You know, there was that feature film that came out. There were all kinds of new books and programs and articles in the press. But in Russia there was absolute silence. And for the very good reason, because Tolstoy is still a threat. He's someone who is remembered for war and peace, and he's remembered for Anna Karenina and the Sebastopol sketches, the patriotic ones. those are the ones that were really hammered down the throats of the Russian population in huge, huge

print runs, while his spiritual writings were basically censored. And so the idea of this man who was preaching against the government back in his lifetime, who was a vegetarian, who was against violence, is someone that the Russians don't really want to know. And apparently the anniversary of his birth is going to be celebrated in 2028, but it remains to be seen how they will go about it. Yes, it's difficult to imagine Putin, sort of enjoying the whole Tolstoyan ideal of sort of vegetarian. Well, unless he doesn't, unless, also, yeah, it's just nonviolence and, you know, pacifism. I don't know if it's anything. It'd be really interesting to see and we will watch.

It's been an absolute delight to speak to you. Oh, total pleasure. Thank you so much. The time has just rocked past, and there were so many things I wanted to talk. asking about beekeeping being one of them. Because, I mean, you know, as a translator and also a historian, I love your sort of, you know, travelling between those two worlds and suddenly revisiting your translation after knowing that he himself was a beekeeper and going back and thinking, actually, I could have translated that a lot better. But that's a conversation for another

time because I would love to get you back. Next time you come to India, Rosamond, you're welcome to come and see my bees in Delhi. We've got three hives. Oh, fantastic. I have no bees, but I would love to hang out. Anyway, look, that is it from this week's Empires. We're going to be recording a very special Q&A episode this week on every Empire series so far. So if you do have any questions at all, tweet them to at EmpirePod UK. That's at EmpirePod UK. Or, of course, you can email them to us at EmpirePod UK at gmail.com. Or tweet them to us at our Twitter address. You've said You are so comprehensive. Did you listen?

Did you listen? Story of my life. I should never tell you. Anyway, on that high, is goodbye from me, Anita Arden. And goodbye from me, William Durham.