Biography
from the Empress Alexandra, and induced Nicholas himself to remark that "the life of this young author must be looked after," and to order that he should be transferred to a less dangerous position.
At the end of 1855, on his return to St. Petersburg, the young and titled "hero of Sebastopol" found all the best houses open to him, while "The Sebastopol Tales" gave him the entrée to the leading literary circles. His earlier works, "Dyetsvo" ("Childhood"), first published in 1852 in the Sovremennik, where it was speedily followed by "Utro Pomyeshchika" and "Otrochestvo" ("Boyhood"), though highly spoken of by Nekrasov and other connoisseurs, do not seem to have attracted general attention. Now, however, he was regarded as one of the leading spirits of that new era of emancipation and enlightenment which coincided with the accession of the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II. But Tolstoi was never able to thrive in literary circles. This was due not so much to his super-sensitiveness and natural reserve as to an intimate conviction, which he invariably expressed with the utmost frankness, that the cult of art and literature was mostly affectation and mere phrasing. He never would believe in the regenerating influence of mere culture. This was the secret of his quarrel with his great contemporary, Turgenev, whose cosmopolitanism, Anglomania, and "gentlemanly way of regarding literature and progress generally," absolutely revolted him. The Russian author, Fet', who met Tolstoi one evening at Nekrasov's, observed in him, at the very first instant, "an involuntary opposition to everything generally accepted in the
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