Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

rules by which to live his life. He did not impress his tutors, nor they him, and he preferred to set puzzling questions for which he then sought the answers himself. What concerned him was not history, geography, or mathematics, but his own conscience, which he explored with an intellectual precocity which astonished his tutors. Though not a straightforward autobiography, Tolstoy's early works—Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth—nonetheless record his acute sensitivity even at this age, and also his endless self-analysis and his snobbish self-conceit. He was also by nature imperious and egotistical, aristocratic traits that were never to leave him, and even his later writings on Christianity and pacifism were to bear the mark of a haughty conceit. He was to remain always a self-educated man, his arguments lacking in method but rich in passion and sincerity, and presented powerfully in lucid prose (though his spelling was poor, even in Russian). ³

Two days after Leo's thirteenth birthday his Aunt Aline died, and the children passed into the care of a new guardian, their aunt Pelagya Yushkov. “Do not abandon us, dear Aunt, for you are all we have left in the world,” wrote the eldest, Nikolai, on behalf of them all. ⁴ After a journey of two weeks by barge and carriage, the four children arrived at their new home in Kazan, a city on the edge of European Russia and once the capital of Tatarstan. Tolstoy read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions and was profoundly moved by the pastoral idyll of the great Romantic prophet (he would later claim to have worn, when fifteen years old, a locket of the Swiss philosopher around his neck like a saint's image). ⁵ In 1844 Tolstoy entered the University of Kazan to study oriental languages, necessary if he was to realize his goal of becoming a diplomat. He did not do well there. He switched to law a year later but did no better. Tolstoy's failure at university was due in large part to his unwillingness to accept the system of university education in which he was “obliged to work at and study things that did not interest me and were unnecessary.” ⁶

His decision to quit the university was eased by the division of the Tolstoy inheritance, from which Leo received as his share Yasnaya