Books: Tolstoy, Troglodyte

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LEO TOLSTOY (836 pp.) — Ernest J. Simmons—Little, Brown ($5).

The Russian writer Turgenev, entertaining a visitor one day in 1855, kept the conversation in whispers for fear of waking Count Tolstoy, who was asleep in the next room. "He's like this all the time," Turgenev explained. "He has come from his battery at Sevastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gypsies, and cards every night; then he sleeps like the dead until two o'clock in the day. . . ."

One of the best things about this new full-length biography of Tolstoy is the picture it gives of the great Russian as a young man. Both of the novels by which he is best remembered were written later: War and Peace in his 30s and Anna Karenina in his 40s. They were not written by the unkempt peasant-patriarch of the last publicized years of Tolstoy's life, but by a rude aristocrat of tremendous energy.

Brothels, Boorishness. "Lyovochka the bubble," as he became known to his three elder brothers, took life with gusto from the start. He loved pillow fights and, at the age of nine, a pretty little house guest whom he pushed downstairs because she gave him too little attention. He was ugly, and in his teens dismayed society by not only looking but behaving like a troglodyte, as Turgenev called him. Neither dressing like a fop nor training on horizontal bars brought the shy Count success with fashionable ladies. He took refuge in boorishness and brothels.

Tolstoy's sense of guilt was as great as his appetite, and Biographer Simmons quotes tortured entries in his diary, full of repentance and good resolutions. When he joined the army as a cadet at 23, serving in the Caucasus, he congratulated himself one day on exorcising the evils of vice, especially gambling. In the next entry he recorded that "on the same day I was so carried away that I lost [850 rubles]. Now I shall restrain myself and live prudently. I went to Chervlyonnaya, got drunk there, and slept with a woman. All this is very bad and troubles me deeply."

War & Literature. At Kazan University, where he had distinguished himself by refusing to be educated, Tolstoy had read the complete works of Rousseau with such adoration that he wore a medallion portrait of him around his neck. In the army he began to write, still under Rousseau's influence and partly in enthusiasm for Laurence Sterne. In 1852 Tolstoy's Childhood, written in camp, excited the reading public in Moscow and won the praise of Turgenev and of Dostoevsky*—then in exile in Siberia.

The firsthand experience of war, which Ernest Hemingway has called indispensable to the greatest writers, awaited Tolstoy at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He commanded a battery of guns at the Fourth Bastion, most exposed point in the city's defenses. Tolstoy wrote the first of his Sevastopol Sketches in a dugout under bombardment. At first he liked the whole thing: "The constant charm of danger, observing the soldiers . . . are so agreeable that I do not wish to leave here. . . ." But before the siege was over he changed his mind. Though he hated physical violence, he beat his soldiers in fits of irritation, and they said they had never known his like for cursing.