Exam
With the death of his Father and Grandmother Tolstoy and his siblings were orphans. Tolstoy moved with his aunt to Kazan and for the next four years did very little with his life. Finally his aunt convinced him to prepare for and take the university entrance exam. While religion, Arabic, French, German, and English received impressive scores his failing scores in Russian history, geography, and statistics would prevent him from passing the exam. Yet not to be discouraged by this he retook the test and passed.
After passing the exam Tolstoy became excited about the prospect of university life, not academia. He liked the way he looked in his uniform and on the first day of class hoped to pass a policeman so as to be saluted, as was customary on the first day.
Social Life
Tolstoy’s perception of the way he looked continued to cause him much stress. He often complained that his clothes didn’t fit the way they did on his brother Sergei. He took gymnastics in hopes of becoming “the strongest man in the world.” Parties were difficult for him. He was naturally shy and would sometimes over compensated for this by being obnoxiously loud, hence the nickname “the bear.” In addition he couldn’t dance and the girls often commented how boring he was. The culmination of these things left Tolstoy lonely and with few close friends.
He did manage to find a close friend in Dmitri Dyakov. Social, religious, and political issues were discussed on a level that provided Tolstoy with the intellectual stimulation he had long sought. Both believed that the purpose of life was to perfect oneself. For the rest of his life Tolstoy would reminisce about Dmitri and the time spent together.
Loss of Innocence
Tolstoy’s first experience with a woman came at the nagging of his brothers. They took him to a brothel where Tolstoy began a 15 year stint of promiscuous behavior. While he shared his bed with several women, eventually contracting gonorrhea, his first experience upset him greatly. Tolstoy later told a friend, “When my brothers took me for the first time to a brothel and I accomplished this act, I then stood by the woman’s bed and wept.” From this point on his sexual desires and moral beliefs would constantly be at odds with each other.
Ideas
Of course Tolstoy kept formulating ideas. Maybe the most important at this time was the idea of perfection. Tolstoy believed one could achieve happiness if they perfected themselves morally, mentally, and physically. He often made lists of what he would do to better himself in each area.
Other ideas came to him as well. He divided society into the upper and lower class and tried, unsuccessfully, to be a part of the upper class. He started formulating ideas about history, a dominant theme in War and Peace, and the worth of a university education.
“History is nothing other than a collection of fables and useless trifles messed up with a mass of unnecessary dates and proper names….Why should any one have to know that the second marriage of Ivan the Terrible to the daughter of Temryuk took place on August 21, 1562, or that the fourth to Ann Alekseyevna Koltovski happened in 1572? Yet they demand that I learn all this by heart, and if I do not know it, they give me a ‘one.’”
Home Again
Discourage socially and academically Tolstoy was all too happy to leave the University even if he had yet obtained a degree. Taken from the busy social life of Kazan and returning to Yasnaya Polyana he writes,
“Solitude is equally beneficial for the man living in society, as society is for the man not living in it. Let a man but withdraw from society and retire into himself and his reason will soon strip off the spectacles through which he has hitherto seen everything in a corrupt light.”
For the next four years Tolstoy did very little. He tried to free the serfs at Yasnaya Polyana but being suspicious of his intentions they rejected his offer. He traveled to St. Petersburg for the first time and fell in love with the city. He began writing but nothing significant came of this.