At War with Himself imagine...

This quiet railway platform is where a remarkable journey came to an end.

It's situated about 300 miles south of Moscow,

at a station that always used to be known as Astapovo.

That was until an elderly writer, feeling unwell,

stepped off the train here.

One week later,

by the time the writer died in the station master's house,

this remote corner of Russia

had become the scene for an extraordinary vigil,

attended by the world's press

and vast crowds of admirers.

Across the country, mass demonstrations broke out,

strikes and even talk of revolution.

Who was this writer who could provoke so much passion,

so much trouble?

Shortly afterwards, the station and the village

were renamed Lev Tolstoy.

This is Tolstoy in 1908, two years before his death,

being mobbed by adoring crowds

on his way to the train station in Moscow.

Tolstoy was by far the most famous Russian of the late 19th century.

A towering, Moses-like figure,

whose immense popularity came firstly from his great novels,

War And Peace and Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy is... Well, in the world of literature, he is God.

But Tolstoy was also one of the most challenging thinkers and moralists

of his age, and a fierce critic of the way the country was run.

He was a professional troublemaker.

Tolstoy was the man who troubled Russia.

He troubled the conscience of the emperors

and he troubled the conscience of the ruling class.

100 years on,

on the centenary of Tolstoy's death last year,

an event celebrated around the world,

the Russian state seemed to deliberately ignore

a writer still seen as uncomfortably anti-establishment.

So what is it that makes Lev Tolstoy such an awkward hero?

I've come to Russia to try and find out.

Sitting in a carriage like this,

heading through the Russian countryside,

it's not hard to imagine you're in a Tolstoy story.

Railways run through so many pages of his fiction.

Poignant departures,

unexpected meetings,

bleak tragedy,

and as the setting for the telling of rich, complex,

but, ultimately, profoundly moral stories.

The sun had been beating down all day on the large

but crowded third-class carriage.

And the heat inside was so stifling

that Necludov stayed out on the brake platform.

And, of all the impressions of that day,

the one that arose in his imagination with extraordinary vividness

was the beautiful face of the second dead prisoner

with its smiling lips,

serious-looking forehead,

and the firm little ear below the blue shaven skull.

And the ghastly thing is that a killing has occurred

and nobody knows who did it.

But it was a killing.

Who is the killer?

Why go to war?

What is marriage for?

What is life for?

Tolstoy was a writer constantly asking his readers

and himself difficult questions.

-TRANSLATION:

-In the end, his thoughts were not those of a famous writer,

but Lev Tolstoy the man.

A man who was never satisfied with himself.

He was dissatisfied for the whole of his life

and he always wanted to be better, better and better.

The Tolstoy family estate is 120 miles south of Moscow

and Tolstoy would have made this journey home many times.

Family meant everything to him.

Tolstoy came from a large family and he produced a large family.

100 years on from his death, his great-grandchildren

and his great-great-grandchildren have come from all over the world

to the ancestral Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana

where they're welcomed at the gates

with the traditional Russian greeting of bread and salt.

In the morning, the play of light and shadow from the big birches

along the avenue is just as it was 60 years ago,

when I noticed this beauty for the first time and fell in love with it.

Tolstoy's love for Yasnaya Polyana,

the lake where he swam,

the orchards that he planted,

the people who worked on his land,

has preserved this Russian idyll almost exactly as it was in his day.

This place, and the house in particular,

not only retains so much detail of Tolstoy's life,

it brings into focus so many fragments of his fiction.

Mama was sitting in the parlour pouring out tea.

In one hand, she held the teapot,

and, with the other, the tap of the samovar,

from which the water poured over the top of the teapot onto the tray.

But, though she was staring intently at it,

she did not realise either this or that we had come in.

So many memories of the past arise when one tries to recall

the features of someone we love

that one recalls those features dimly through the memories,

as though through tears.

They are the tears of imagination.

Tolstoy should have had an idyllic childhood

but instead it was scarred by family tragedy.

He was very young when his mother died.

I mean, two years old.

That must have had an enormous impact on him subsequent.

Certainly, he was too young to retain any memories of her,

but spiritual image,

only spiritual image,

which influenced Tolstoy throughout his long life.

To lose your mother, never to know her,

not to be able to envisage her face,

that must be a tremendous loss for anyone,

but then to lose your father subsequently,

when he was only nine years old, I mean...

He must have been bereft, really.

He must have had a strong personality

to be able to deal with that.

Yeah, certainly. Tolstoy, as well as his brothers and sister,

on the one hand, he was unhappy.

He was unhappy he lost his parents.

But, on the other hand, Tolstoy had his beloved Yasnaya Polyana.

In a way, Yasnaya Polyana was the substitution

for the absence of his parents.

Yasnaya Polyana was Tolstoy's cradle and grave.

-TRANSLATION:

-Yasnaya Polyana remained a powerful attraction for him,

a magnet that always drew him back,

because his most important memories of early childhood

were associated with this place.

I remember my father in his study

where we used to come to say goodnight to him

and sometimes merely to play.

He used to sit there with a pipe in his mouth on a leather couch.

Sometimes, to our immense delight,

he would let us climb on the couch behind his back

while he would continue reading or talking to the steward.

-TRANSLATION:

-Maybe Tolstoy didn't have this childhood.

This was how he would have liked to have seen it.

This was how he imagined it.

This was how he imagined a loving family life.

And love came to be the reason for his entire existence,

including the basis for his religious views.

When there were children at Yasnaya Polyana,

the Tolstoy brothers called themselves the Ant Brotherhood.

The essence of what Yasnaya meant to Tolstoy

grew out of a magical story

that his eldest brother had invented for them.

Leo Tolstoy was five,

Nikolai, he was 11,

and Nikolai announced that he had known a secret,

how to make all people happy.

That marvellous secret was written on the green stick

and that little green stick

was buried in the forest at the edge of the ravine by the road,

and the one who would find the green stick could make all people happy.

It would be a kind of golden age. People would become Ant Brothers.

People would live without wars, diseases,

in peace and Christian love and friendship.

But Nikolai died

and the secret, how to make all people happy, died with him.

But, for Tolstoy,

that naive, childish legend, in the years to come,

became a profound philosophical symbol.

The death of his father brought an end to Tolstoy's rural childhood

and it was decided that he and his siblings

would have to leave Yasnaya Polyana

to live with an aunt in Kazan.

Kazan, the ancient Tatar capital,

is 500 miles east of Moscow.

Since the 18th century, the city's maintained an impressive reputation

as a place where Muslims and Christians

have lived side by side in peace.

Tolstoy's aunt, Polina, was married to the governor of Kazan

and the young Tolstoys moved into what was then

the grand governorial residence.

Well, I suppose it's hardly surprising

that, one revolution and two world wars later,

it's not the centre of elegant society it used to be.

Hello?

Hello?

HAMMERING

The mansion is now being restored

to celebrate Tolstoy's teenage years in the city.

But not everything that happened to Tolstoy in Kazan merits celebration.

Shortly after the Tolstoys arrived in the city,

the older brothers decided that 14-year-old Lev

was ready to be introduced to sex.

So they took him to a brothel,

which just happened to be located right next to the monastery

where their grandfather was buried.

It was simultaneously an act of sex and sacrilege

that appears to have haunted him for the rest of his life.

Many years later, Tolstoy would recall the incident,

describing how, after the act,

he wept bitterly by the side of the bed.

The point is now he's already into this cycle

where he goes through, interminably, all the way through his life,

of living very badly indeed

and then regretting it and castigating himself.

The turning point came when he was about 14 or 15 years old,

because suddenly he read Rousseau

and, when he read Rousseau,

he found confirmation of how awful he was,

but the great relief of knowing

that all other boys did rather disgusting things to themselves.

-All other children were...

-Savages?

..young savages,

and that, first of all, must have given him a sense of relief.

"Thank goodness it's not just me!"

Two years after arriving in the city,

Tolstoy applied to study here at the prestigious Kazan University.

As soon as I entered the university auditorium,

I felt my personality disappearing

in this throng of self-confident young people

who surged noisily through all the doors and corridors.

When the professor came in

and everybody shifted about and then settled in their seats,

I was amazed when he began his lecture

with an introductory sentence which, in my opinion, did not make sense.

I wanted the lecture to be so clever from beginning to end

that it would be impossible to omit or add a single word.

Disappointed in this, I immediately proceeded to sketch 18 caricatures

joined together in a circle, like a wreath,

and only occasionally moved my hand across the page

to make the professor think I was taking notes.

Things appear to have gone from bad to worse,

so much so that the university authorities

finally resorted to imprisonment.

When Lev Nikolaievich failed to attend lectures,

he was locked up overnight

here in Kazan University's very own detention cell,

where offenders were supposed to reflect on their misdemeanours

with a night in the pitch dark.

You can see the beginning

of Tolstoy's lifelong contempt for authority.

According to a fellow prisoner,

he produced a candle from his boot

and spent the night doing impersonations

of the university professors.

Of course he was a bad student,

totally unsuited to structured education.

He walked out without a degree, of course,

having failed in two faculties.

Never regretted it.

In fact, he said triumphantly on a number of occasions,

"I am so glad I never went anywhere near

"an orthodox institute of education again in the rest of my life

"and I benefited from it."

I think he probably did benefit from it.

He had this raging, uncontrollable spirit

leaping off in all directions.

But it wasn't that Tolstoy lacked intellectual ambition.

He had a plan of his own.

A rigorous one which he confided to his diary.

One - to study the whole course of law

necessary for my final examination at the university.

Two - to study practical medicine and some theoretical...

Three - to study languages... French, Russian...

Four - to study agriculture...

Five - to study history, geography and statistics...

Six - to study mathematics, the grammar school course.

Seven - to write a dissertation.

Eight - to attain an average degree of perfection in music...

Nine - to write down rules.

Ten - to acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences...

In fact, Tolstoy was forever making lists and plans

and promises to himself to be the strongest, the cleverest,

the most saintly model of manhood.

However, in diary entries that often remind you more of Adrian Mole

than a future literary giant,

he quickly discovers that writing the lists is the easy part.

18th April, 1847.

I wrote down a lot of rules all of a sudden

and wanted to follow them all,

but I wasn't strong enough to do so.

So now I want to set myself one rule only

and to add another one to it

only when I've got used to following that one.

The first rule which I prescribe is as follows.

Number one - carry out everything you have resolved must be carried out.

I haven't carried out this rule.

So why did Tolstoy have such trouble sticking to his own rules?

Looking through his extraordinary early diaries,

a recurring feature is his sexual appetite

and the guilt that went with it.

In fact, the very first entry in his diary

comes as a direct result of his indulgences.

17th March, 1847.

It is now six days since I entered the clinic,

and for six days now I've been almost satisfied with myself.

I caught gonorrhoea, where one usually catches it from, of course,

and this trivial circumstance gave me a jolt.

18th April. I couldn't refrain.

I beckoned to something in pink

which, in the distance, seemed to me very nice

and opened the door at the back.

She came in. I couldn't see her.

It was vile and repulsive.

I even hate her because I've broken my rules on her account.

Terrible remorse.

That was censored

in the Soviet editions of Tolstoy's diaries, of course,

and I can remember my Russian teacher, who came from Siberia,

being totally incredulous when I told her

that was what Tolstoy's diaries were about.

He was self-obsessed,

and I think the diaries and the letters are, in a way,

a way of making up a story about himself.

I must say I was shocked when I read them.

I was enthralled that anyone could write so honestly at that time.

-If it is honest!

-I think it is honest.

And I think that, in a way, he loves castigating himself.

I think all that stuff about sex,

which might strike some readers as very shocking

and others as a bit peculiar,

that was him.

-TRANSLATION:

-The main thought that can be traced

through all of his diaries,

which he started at an early age and continued up to his death,

is the thought of the meaning of good and the meaning of evil.

"What am I?"

"Good or evil?"

"And what is good?"

"What is evil?"

To resolve this, the most important task,

Tolstoy embarks on a life of artistic creativity.

So when did Tolstoy actually begin to write?

In April 1847, Tolstoy's student days came to an abrupt end

when he inherited his portion of the family estate,

including his beloved Yasnaya Polyana,

and he immediately headed home.

Over the next few years, the diaries give us a glimpse

of a depressive and unfocused youth

who is beginning to think about writing in some shape or form.

However, this typical diary entry sums up his greatest problem.

April 17th, 1851.

Wrote nothing.

Laziness got the better of me.

One month later, however, everything had changed.

I'm writing at ten o'clock at night on June 30th.

How did I get here?

I don't know.

Why? I don't know either.

I'd like to write a lot

about the journey from Astrakhan to the village,

the Cossacks, the cowardice of the Tatars, and the Steppe.

GUNFIRE

All of a sudden, Tolstoy had decided to join his brother Nikolai,

who was serving in the army here in Chechnya.

Russia was engaged in a war

with this small, mountainous Muslim nation on its southern border.

It was in many ways the same futile conflict

that drags on in the region today.

Nikolai was based in a village on the banks of the great Terek River

which, at the time, provided a border

between Russian and Chechen territory.

In this remote outpost of the empire,

Tolstoy spent nearly two and a half years of his life

as a volunteer cadet soldier.

He spent his time chasing the Cossack girls, playing cards,

hunting for pheasants and hares

and taking part in the occasional raid into enemy territory,

an experience which he clearly enjoyed

and which earned him commendations for bravery.

However, the most important feature of life in Chechnya was boredom.

There was very little to do

and it was this combination of isolation and tedium

that gave Tolstoy the inspiration to write.

He began to work on an idea for a novel

about the subject that he knew best

- himself.

Childhood, his first book,

was an immediate hit with the Russian reading public.

Although it's a novel,

it draws on those early days at Yasnaya Polyana,

a childhood most notable for the absence of a mother.

Mama is talking to someone

and the sound of her voice is so sweet, so warm,

just the sound of it goes to my heart.

I gaze at her face and all at once she becomes quite, quite little.

Her face no bigger than a button.

"So you love me very much?"

She is silent for a moment

and then says,

"Mind you always love me

"and never forget me."

This silhouette is probably the only image

Tolstoy ever knew of his mother.

It's partly a memory, of course it is,

but much of it is the childhood he didn't have that he wished he'd had.

I've sometimes thought that maybe the origins of his creativity,

in a way, was trying to recapture that lost figure of the mother.

But it is all about him, isn't it?

He was the ultimate narcissist, wasn't he?

He found himself infinitely fascinating

so all of his literary oeuvre really is the story of himself.

His diary is an attempt to try and record his entire life,

his consciousness as it unfolded.

No-one had ever penetrated psychological processes

as they evolved.

No-one had ever written from a child's point of view,

as Tolstoy had. It was a totally new voice.

In his first novel, Childhood,

Tolstoy found a reason for writing that lasted a lifetime.

His unwaveringly honest fascination with himself, his own experiences,

his own soul, would go on to provide a continuous thread

through the whole shelf of his fiction.

After two years in Chechnya,

Tolstoy received his commission as an artillery officer

and was posted west to the Black Sea region,

where his regiment was embroiled in the build-up to the Crimean War.

I headed down to the Crimea,

in what is now the Ukraine,

following in his tracks.

At one point, he was based at an army encampment on the Belbek River,

which runs a few miles outside the city of Sevastopol.

We went looking for the likely spot where Tolstoy was billeted

and where he succumbed to a disastrous addiction to gambling.

Strangely, this little valley is once again being used

as a temporary home for a troop of men,

although now the bored and frustrated Ukrainians

we met here aren't soldiers but railway workers,

understandably bemused by our appearance at their station.

MAN SPEAKS IN UKRAINIAN

Astonishingly, this is the place where the momentous event took place

where he lost a great part of his fortune

and the Yasnaya Polyana house.

He writes on 28th January, just a few days after he's arrived,

"Played shtos for two days and nights.

"The result is understandable. The loss of everything.

"The Yasnaya Polyana house.

"I think there's no point in writing.

"I'm so disgusted with myself

"that I'd like to forget about my existence.

"6th, 7th and 8th February.

"Played cards again and lost another 200 roubles.

"I can't promise to stop.

"12th February..."

I mean, this just goes on and on over this whole period.

"12th February. Lost 75 roubles again.

"God is still merciful to me.

"I'm squandering my life, not living.

"My losses, however, are forcing me to come to my senses a bit."

As a result of these losses,

the main house at Yasnaya Polyana was sold and dismantled.

A stone still marks the spot where it once stood,

a poignant reminder

of the young Tolstoy's obsessive and reckless personality.

That gambling there, where he lost tens of thousands,

it's interesting that it happens at the very moment

where he's about to go in and risk his life.

So there must have been a great deal of stress going on.

I think so, and, also, an urgent inward impulse

to live life right to the extreme.

It's what Russian culture's all about.

It doesn't have the kind of compromises that we have.

Compromise is a very positive concept in English culture.

Not in Russia.

Russia was born to extremities.

That's why you've got Moscow versus St Petersburg.

And look at the novels.

War and Peace, Crime and Punishment and so on.

It's generally characterised by going out beyond normality

to extremes of experience,

and then the registering of it in good literature.

Towards the end of 1854, Tolstoy crossed by boat into Sevastopol.

CANNON FIRE

Earlier that year, the Tsar had decided to occupy territory

previously controlled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire

with the aim of getting a Russian foothold on the Mediterranean.

Here in the Black Sea, the Russian navy destroyed a Turkish fleet.

Alarmed, the British and the French joined forces

to protect their interests in the region.

This elegant city became the main focus of the Crimean War.

The Siege of Sevastopol

and the horror of his time here on the front line

was a defining experience for Tolstoy,

the soldier and the writer.

Here, from the heart of the conflict,

he wrote three revelatory stories

describing the reality of war.

The first of these stories or sketches,

takes the reader on a journey through the city.

The narrator begins by describing the strange normality

that continues in the streets and shops and restaurants.

Yes, disenchantment certainly awaits you

on entering Sevastopol for the first time.

You will look in vain in any of these faces

for signs of disquiet, perplexity,

or even of enthusiasm, determination or readiness for death.

There is nothing of the kind.

What you see are ordinary people

quietly occupied with ordinary activities.

But, as the narrator walks up the hill through the town,

the environment begins to change.

EXPLOSIONS

The whizz of cannonball or bomb nearby

impresses you unpleasantly as you ascend the hill.

And the meaning of the sounds is very different

from what it seemed to be when they reached you in the town.

You involuntarily expand your chest, raise your head higher

and clamber up the slippery clay hill.

You've climbed only a little way

before bullets begin to whizz past you to the right and left,

and you will perhaps consider whether you had not better

walk inside the trench that runs parallel to the road.

You think you hear the thud of a cannonball not far off

and you seem to hear the sounds of bullets all around,

some humming like bees, some whistling

and some rapidly flying past with a shrill shriek

like the string of some instrument.

So this is the 4th Bastion.

This is that terrible, truly dreadful spot.

But you are mistaken.

This is not the 4th Bastion yet.

When you have gone some 300 steps more,

you will come out at another battery.

A flat space with many holes

surrounded with sandbags and cannons on platforms,

and the whole place walled in with earthworks.'

The 4th Bastion was a kind of hell.

The focus of the most intense bombardment and fighting.

Thousands died here throughout the siege

and this is where Tolstoy's Sevastopol story

reaches its dramatic climax.

Suddenly, the most fearful roar strikes not only your ears

but your whole being and makes you shudder all over.

It's followed by the whistle of the departing ball

and a thick cloud of powder smoke envelops you, the platform

and the black, moving figures of the sailors.

You'll hear various comments made by the sailors

concerning this shot of ours

and you'll notice their animation.

The evidence is of a feeling you had not perhaps expected...

..the feeling of animosity and thirst for vengeance

which lies hidden in each man's soul.

When someone is blasted from the earth

with a big bomb in the 4th Bastion,

in the earthworks there, this has happened to Tolstoy as well.

He's served right at the front, right in the thick of things.

He was recommended for bravery on several occasions.

You've got the whiff of cordite and the smell of blood and everything

in those war scenes in the novel. They're very gripping indeed.

You do have the feeling very much in those stories of the eyewitness,

that this is happening, unfolding, before this author.

He published his first sketch, which is, I believe,

the most anthologised piece of writing that he ever wrote.

It was a sensation amongst the wider public.

I've traced the uses of these sketches through the 19th century

and even into the early 20th century,

and you see them being incorporated into histories of the period.

They are treated like memoirs.

Despite the shockingly frank description of the war zone,

the first sketch was a deeply patriotic work,

a celebration of the bravery of the Russian soldier

that was immediately popular in St Petersburg.

The Tsar loved it so much that he had it sent to Brussels right away

and translated into French for a foreign audience.

Shortly after, he began the second of his Sevastopol sketches.

This time, the pride and patriotism have evaporated.

The loss of life is depicted as terribly and utterly pointless.

The Russian censor deleted large sections of the work.

There, I have said what I wish to say this time,

but I am seized by an oppressive doubt.

Perhaps I ought to have left it unsaid.

Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided

and where the good that should be imitated?

Who is the villain and who is the hero of the story?

All are good

and all are bad.

The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul,

whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty,

who has been, is and will be beautiful, is truth.

He becomes far more realistic, as he would see it,

far more honest about things,

and declares the whole thing to be a waste of energy and just brutality,

and this is made clear in the second sketch,

and it's emphasised by the ending of the sketch,

where he says the hero of this story wasn't a soldier, it wasn't me,

it wasn't anybody. The hero of this story is truth,

and that truth, that warfare is always demeaning, violent,

unnecessary, useless and disgusting,

that will stay with him for the rest of his life

and underlie all the pacifist teachings of his later works.

I think that Tolstoy

was the first really grown-up author of world literature

because all the writers which wrote before him,

they could be interesting, provoking, charming,

but still they seem adolescent to me.

Tolstoy, when he started writing as a young man,

he started writing from the very beginning as an adult,

as a grown-up person describing life as it is, without any fleurs,

without... Concealing nothing.

His first novellas about the war in the Caucasus, about Sevastopol,

they are very much unlike Dickens or Pushkin or Lermontov.

They are about real life.

They are really frightening.

They are not pretty at all.

And he went on like this, becoming stronger and stronger and stronger,

before he started thinking of himself as a new prophet.

From the blasted ruins of Sevastopol in the south,

Tolstoy came straight here,

to fashionable, intellectual, imperial St Petersburg.

On his way to the capital, he clearly felt a great relief

to be leaving the war behind him,

but also a new sense of purpose,

buoyed up by the success of the first sketch.

He wrote in his diary...

My career is literature.

To write and write.

From tomorrow, I'll work all my life or give up everything.

Literary Russia in the 19th century produced an extraordinary

and wildly contrasting crop of writers,

including Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov,

as well as Turgenev and Tolstoy.

None of them were what we would call explicitly political writers,

but the very act of writing about Russia

brought them into conflict with the Tsarist state.

Pushkin and Lermontov were sent into exile.

Dostoevsky was put in front of a mock firing squad

and sent to Siberia.

And they all suffered extensive censorship

when anything they wrote was deemed to question the status quo.

Tolstoy's own outspoken account of the Crimean War

attracted not only the attention of the censor,

but also St Petersburg's radical literary set.

When Tolstoy arrived here in St Petersburg,

the first person he went to visit was the writer Ivan Turgenev.

Turgenev, then in his 30s,

was a brilliant and influential novelist

who'd been Tolstoy's literary hero

ever since he was a student in Kazan.

And, for nearly a month, Tolstoy camped on Turgenev's sofa.

However, Tolstoy wasn't an easy house guest.

He spent the nights out whoring and gambling and the days sleeping.

Turgenev wrote to a friend,

"You cannot picture to yourself what a dear and remarkable man he is,

"although I have nicknamed him the troglodyte

"because of his uncouth passions and buffalo-like obstinacy."

It was a notoriously bitchy relationship

and there were countless entries in Tolstoy's diaries

fulminating about Turgenev.

He's an uncongenial, cold and difficult person

and I'm sorry for him.

I'll never get on with him.

But, on the very first day that Turgenev met Tolstoy,

he brought him here to the apartment of Nikolai Nekrasov for lunch.

Nekrasov was an influential liberal figure,

and kingpin of the literary scene in St Petersburg,

and these handsome rooms

were the forum for the city's radical conversation and debate.

It was Nekrasov who'd first recognised Tolstoy's talent

when he published the unsolicited manuscript of Childhood.

Now he was printing Tolstoy's critiques of the Crimean War,

the increasingly contentious Sevastopol Sketches,

in his magazine, the Contemporary.

I think it was 20,000 copies which were read all around the country

by nobility,

by estate owners, by students,

by high school students,

by everybody who want to read Russian.

And there was a line to buy it,

and each new issue in a small provincial city was an event.

"Have you read this magazine?"

"Give it to me", and so on.

There was whole circulation of this.

Turgenev was a leading light

in this radical literary world of the Contemporary

and there's no doubt that, for a new writer in St Petersburg,

this was the place to be.

That afternoon, they talked,

they ate together, they played chess,

and, by the end of the day, Nekrasov, clearly captivated,

concluded that Tolstoy was even better than his writing.

But Tolstoy was far too independent and obstinate to fit in.

Even though he himself arranged this group photograph,

you can see how uncomfortable he looks.

And it wasn't just Tolstoy's manner that set him apart

from other members of the literary world.

Tolstoy was a land-owning count

and the hot topic of the day

was land reform and the abolition of feudal slavery.

For many of his writer friends,

emancipation of the serfs was a political concept

but, for Tolstoy, as a landowner, this was personal.

He was the master of a great estate

and the owner of over 300 peasants.

It was an issue of conscience

that preoccupied him for the rest of his life.

There had been Tolstoys at the imperial court for generations

and the young Count Tolstoy

had privileged access to the Mariinsky Palace

via this extraordinary six-storey ramp

which led straight to the private apartments

of a royal lady-in-waiting,

his young aunt Alexandrine.

This is where they were first seen by everyone,

because music played from the gallery,

musicians were located there, music played when they arrived,

and, when dances started at the palace, they started over here

and then proceeded to the so-called White Hall,

which was used as a ballroom.

So, when he came here in 1856,

-he'd been in Sevastopol, he'd been fighting the war.

-Right.

How did he fit in then?

He mixed with the literary set, of course,

but he still visited his aunt.

Right, but the literary set whom he communicated,

that was Nekrasov and other people,

they were not persons of very special rank.

Turgenev, though, says, "Why don't you go off and join your princesses

"and disappear off with your posh friends?",

so there was a sense, wasn't there,

that Tolstoy belonged to this privileged class?

By all means. And he enjoyed it, by the way,

particularly in the beginning before he started to live

a simple way of life like that.

So he enjoyed being an aristocrat

and being treated as an aristocrat, indeed.

So Tolstoy would have come here to see his aunt Alexandra, then.

Exactly. Exactly.

What was the relationship like with her?

He liked this lady immensely.

He used to call her "Joy and consolation".

She understood. She was very witty, very intelligent.

She possessed very strong will and quite an encyclopaedic knowledge,

particularly, with the time she served at court,

she learned more and more,

and he even fell in love with her.

Though someone said that there was rumour in St Petersburg

that she would marry Leo Tolstoy,

and, with her typical humour, she replied,

"When it happens, let me know about it!"

It seems he did think of marrying Alexandrine,

but, instead, their relationship turned into a friendship,

a friendship that lasted throughout most of his life.

Tolstoy, in his early 30s, struggled with his writing,

and his diaries reveal a restlessness

and a morose lack of resolve,

barely changed from his student days in Kazan.

October 1860.

Irresolution, idleness, melancholy...

Thoughts of death.

I must escape from this.

And then, quite suddenly, two years later, he did.

September 1862.

Letter to Alexandrine.

I am writing from the country.

As I write, I can hear upstairs the voice of my wife,

whom I love more than anything in the world.

I've lived to the age of 34

and I didn't know it was possible to be so much in love and so happy.

Tolstoy's new bride

was an 18-year-old girl from Moscow called Sofia,

Sofia Andreevna Bers,

one of the daughters of an old friend.

She doesn't remember precisely when she met Tolstoy,

but she remembers that, when Tolstoy was leaving for war,

the Crimean War,

he stopped at their house to say goodbye,

and she was 11 and it was the moment when she thought

that she would become a nurse

and join him at the front.

But, of course, that did not happen.

The war was brief and, that same year, when she was 11,

she read the Sevastopol tales

and she read Tolstoy's novel Childhood and she cried over it.

Despite their long acquaintance,

the betrothal and marriage were rushed, awkward and brutal.

Perhaps the strangest event of the engagement

was when Tolstoy insisted that Sofia read his diaries,

full of the details of his whoring, venereal diseases

and his recent affair with a peasant girl.

It's a painfully telling moment in Tolstoy's story.

We've seen him as an orphan child,

a difficult teenager,

a dissolute young man,

but here, at the moment of his wedding,

he comes across as something altogether darker.

What did she make of what she saw in his diaries?

It was before the wedding that he gave her the diaries

and she was appalled by his past.

She imagined the man she would marry

as a completely new, pure person.

She was barely 18,

she'd just turned 18,

and Tolstoy, who was so sensitive in his novels,

lacked this sensitivity in actual life.

In Sofia's autobiography, written many years later,

she reveals just how traumatic the wedding,

and in particular the wedding night, had been.

After Biryulyovo, and even back at the station,

the torment began which every bride must go through,

not to mention the agony.

What an embarrassment it was.

How painful.

How dreadfully humiliating.

Sofia describes her first night as a rape

and they made a stop in Biryulyovo to change stations,

that was not far from Moscow,

and Tolstoy told her to serve tea

and she was so tense.

Tolstoy's diary entry is brutally unaffected.

She was in tears in the carriage.

She knows everything and it's simple.

Her timidity,

something morbid.

You can't help feeling sorry for Sofia, the new Countess Tolstoy.

After the ordeal of the marriage and the nightmare journey,

she arrives here at Yasnaya Polyana, her new home,

the place where she would live for the rest of her life.

What she finds is a remote, dilapidated house,

surrounded by overgrown and untended grounds,

and a husband who, though passionate about his new wife,

was moody, remote

and often absent for days at a time on hunting expeditions.

Here is an area where Tolstoy has been given the benefit of doubt

when there isn't any doubt.

He was nothing less than brutal towards her.

I don't mean physically.

I don't think he ever beat her up or knocked her around,

but he treated her very badly indeed.

Yet, despite the fact that Tolstoy

was clearly an impossibly difficult husband,

it was also an incredibly passionate marriage.

I cannot love him any more than I already do.

I already love him to such excess with all my heart and soul

that there is nothing in my mind but my love for him. Nothing.

The Tolstoys were man and wife for 46 years.

Yes, it was a complex and often tortured relationship,

but it was also an intensely productive and creative union.

Sofia became both his copyist and his unofficial editor,

and, without her, it's hard to believe

he could have achieved what he did.

Exactly nine months after the wedding,

Sofia gave birth to her first child, Sergei,

the first of 13 babies

which she brought into the world over 25 years.

Eight of these children survived childhood

and went on to procreate today's grand dynasty.

An impressive testament to the happier years

of Lev and Sofia's marathon marriage.

There certainly was a time

when I think he must have been not just happy but blissfully happy,

and there's no doubt in my mind

that he knew he was going to write a major work of history

and about humanity,

and it just came out of his history as a writer.

He fully matured

and it just happened at the time, as well, when his life came right.

He'd written 20 or 30 short stories of one kind or another

of varying quality,

but many of them showing a lot of great promise indeed,

and he said, "I just feel that there is something working its way up

"within me which can only be described as epic."

He actually used the word.

War and Peace, this wonderful epic,

surely it's the gold standard by which novels are all judged now.

Probably the greatest novel that's ever been written.

A massive epic dealing with tidal waves of humanity

moving across Europe, and yet an intimate epic,

because you zoom down from those heights

and you look at the intimate dealings

of individuals all the way through.

Natasha sampled everything.

Never in her life, she thought,

had she seen or tasted buttermilk cakes like these,

such delicious preserves,

such nuts in honey

or a chicken like this one.

Rostov and Uncle,

as they downed their cherry-flavoured vodka after supper,

talked of hunts past and future.

Natasha felt so happy at heart,

so much at home in these new surroundings

that her only fear was that the trap would come for her too soon.

When the conversation broke down for a moment,

as it almost always does when you have friends in for the first time,

Uncle responded to what was in his guests' minds by saying,

"There you have it, me in my last days, soon be dead.

"There for the chase, nothing left after that,

"so what's wrong with a bit of living in sin?"

My mother was a teacher of Russian literature,

and I think that she was a very cunning person.

When I was, I think, 10 or 11 years old, she told me,

"Look, this is...

"On this upper shelf, is the novel War and Peace.

"You are never, ever to touch it before you are 15.

"You will understand nothing.

"It is meant for grown-ups."

And, of course, the first thing I did after she left,

I started reading this thick novel.

I skipped of course all the love scenes.

I read only about war

but, by the age of 11, I was a fan of Tolstoy.

Because for us, for me,

Andrei Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostova or Pierre Bezukhov,

they are alive,

not like real people who used to live in the 19th century.

In fact, they are more alive to me than a lot of people

that live today and whom I know personally.

If the so-called peace,

the domestic scenes in War and Peace,

grew from Tolstoy's own family life...

..equally, the war or public scenes

were based on some of the most important events

in recent Russian history.

In 1812, Napoleon's army invaded Russia.

The following conflict saw horrendous casualties,

the destruction of Moscow,

followed by the decimation of the French

as they retreated in the middle of winter.

This triumphal arch,

built on the great highway heading west out of Moscow,

commemorates the Russian victory.

The turning point in the war, the Battle of Borodino,

continues to have great historical, political and emotional significance

for the Russians and is re-enacted every year

on the battlefield about 60 miles west of Moscow.

CHEERING

And it's this vast iconic clash,

a battle that took the lives of at least 70,000 men,

which Tolstoy brought to life as the climax of War and Peace.

-TRANSLATION:

-For people like me involved in the reconstruction,

War and Peace is the Bible.

The thing is, Lev Tolstoy himself was a serving officer.

His baptism of fire was in the Crimea

and no-one can describe things like he does.

He's not simply the greatest writer.

He is a military man.

Tolstoy's epic account of Borodino

takes up about 250 pages of War and Peace.

It was written only 50 years after the event,

when the last veterans were only just dying out,

and Tolstoy made sure he read and researched voraciously

around the subject.

To help bring the whole thing alive in his mind,

in the autumn 1867,

he made a special trip here to the battlefield.

He took with him his wife Sofia's younger brother Stepan

who was only 12 years old.

You can imagine, the boy must have been in heaven,

pacing out the troop manoeuvres

and identifying all the landmarks of the battle

with his knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide.

Where was Napoleon?

Where did Kutuzov, the great Russian field marshal, make his camp?

How were the two giant armies

arrayed across this gentle rural landscape

before the slaughter began?

When Tolstoy and Stepan arrived at Borodino,

they stayed in a monastery on the edge of the battle site.

Today, that monastery has been turned into a museum

dedicated to Tolstoy's visit

and the extraordinarily vivid account

of the battle which it inspired.

-TRANSLATION:

-This document looks like it was written here at Borodino.

You can see the top part of the page is in a child's round hand.

It seems as if Tolstoy was dictating his thoughts and ideas to Stepan,

who wrote them down whilst they were inspecting the Borodino battlefield.

They even drew a little plan

of how the sun rises and sets over Borodino field.

Tolstoy was very pleased with his research trip,

and wrote to his wife, Sofia Andreevna,

"If God will give me health and peace of mind,

"I will write the Battle of Borodino

"in a way that's never been done before."

Rostov, without waiting to hear him out,

touched his horse, galloped to the front of his squadron

and, before he had time to finish giving the word of command,

the whole squadron, sharing his feeling, was following him.

Rostov himself did not know how or why he did it.

He acted as he did when hunting,

without reflecting or considering.

He saw the dragoons near and that they were galloping in disorder.

He knew they could not withstand an attack,

knew there was only that moment

and that, if he let it slip, it would not return.

One of the main characters of War and Peace

is an enthusiastic young cavalry officer called Nikolai Rostov.

For Rostov, the excitement and bravado of the battlefield

soon evaporates when confronted by his enemy.

The French dragoon officer was hopping with one foot on the ground,

the other being caught in the stirrup.

His eyes, screwed up with fear

as if he, every moment, expected another blow,

gazed up at Rostov with shrinking terror.

His pale and mud-stained face, fair and young

with a dimple in the chin and light-blue eyes,

was not an enemy's face at all suited to a battlefield,

but a most ordinary, home-like face.

Before Rostov had decided what to do with him,

the officer cried, "I surrender!"

Rostov galloped back with the rest,

aware of an unpleasant feeling of depression in his heart.

Something vague and confused which he could not at all account for

had come over him with the capture of that officer

and the blow he had dealt him.

I think a very interesting figure in War and Peace

is young Nikolai Rostov, who...

Incredibly well-described as a young cavalry officer.

I don't know if you remember the scene

where he raises his sabre in a battle

and, in the very moment of raising his sabre

against this poor French officer, he sees the man's fear in his face

and he thinks, "What the hell am I doing?"

And he brings the sword down and he just snicks the man.

And, thereafter, they're all saying, "Well done, Rostov,"

and the colonel says,

"You'll get a decoration from the emperor for this, my boy,"

and he feels utter wretchedness and misery inside

and the story has begun of his realising

that it's mad fighting battles

and attacking people with swords and guns

and war is just fundamentally wrong.

It's a brilliant scene

in which you see the whole seeds of pacifism

growing in the novelist's mind.

In War and Peace,

we see Tolstoy bring to life a staggering 500 characters,

building a world, a narrative and an emotional landscape

that remains unequalled.

The book is a profoundly patriotic narrative.

It charts the defeat and expulsion of an invading foreign army

and, as such, it was a book that was handed out by Stalin's commissars

during the Second World War

to motivate the Red Army

in their monumental struggle against the Nazis.

However, the abiding moral message of this book

is not patriotism, but pacifism.

The angry protest of the Sevastopol Sketches

has matured into an anatomical examination of the evils of war.

One or two dark clouds had come up

and a fine drizzle was sprinkling the dead, the wounded, the fearful,

the weary and the wavering.

"Good people, that's enough," it seemed to say.

"Stop and think.

"What are you doing?"

This voice of moral authority that Tolstoy discovered in War and Peace

would go on in the second half of his life

to become ever louder, more urgent and central to his writing.

It was 1869 when Tolstoy finished War and Peace

and he had every reason to feel confident and relaxed.

The book was hugely successful and the money was rolling in,

but, while travelling out in the country,

he ended up staying in a hotel in the small, remote town of Arzamas.

It's quite difficult to understand the thing.

He woke in the night and he had a terrible vision of Death

bearing down upon him

and that vision of Death told him that, because death exists,

life itself was not worth living.

It's a kind of existential madness that came upon him.

Absolute abject terror.

We all know that Tolstoy is a titanic figure, isn't he?

A big man who could lift heavy weights and wrote great works,

lived to be 82, fathered 13 children.

Everything he did was gargantuan.

And so was this...

What the rest of us would call a mid-life crisis.

A sudden loss of confidence in everything in the world.

I was afraid to get up from the sofa.

Afraid of driving away sleep.

And just to be sitting in that room seemed awful.

I didn't get up, but fell into a sort of doze.

I thought of going out of the room to get away from what was tormenting me,

but it followed me and made everything seem dark and dreary.

My feeling of horror, instead of leaving me, was increasing.

"What nonsense," I said to myself.

"Why am I so dejected?

"What am I afraid of?"

"You are afraid of me."

I heard the voice of Death.

"I am here".

I shuddered.

Yes. Death.

Death will come.

It will come.

The nightmare encounter with his own mortality

and the inevitability of death in the hotel room at Arzamas

would mark a turning point in Tolstoy's life

and the beginning of a transformation that would lead him

to reject and dispense with everything he'd achieved,

everything he owned and everything he loved.

In part two, we follow Tolstoy as he transforms himself

from troubled novelist into Russia's leading troublemaker.

We travel through the emptiness of a Russian steppe...

Look, I've really drunk it!

..through the dark pages of his masterpiece Anna Karenina

and on into religious and political turmoil

as he's excommunicated from the church

and branded an enemy of the state.

All that and brutal heartbreak.

I was never even in love.

I truly believe that death, with our love intact,

would be preferable to this misery.