During the week that the dead Emperor's body lay in state in the cathedral, Sub-lieutenant Leo Tolstoy was stationed more than a thousand miles to the south. He was in the Crimea, near the besieged city of Sevastopol. Here nature was already beginning to display its crocuses, snowdrops and hyacinths; and larks, linnets and brilliant goldfinches were twittering and singing their songs. On March 1st, the lieutenant wrote in his diary: “The Emperor died on February 18th, and now we are to take the oath to the new Emperor. Great changes await Russia. It is necessary to work and be manly to take part in these important moments of Russia's life.”

No doubt he was exhorting himself as he often did. His mother had died when he was almost two and his father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, when he was almost nine. Kindly relatives completed the upbringing of the five Tolstoy children, but from an early age Leo exhorted and chastised himself as if he were his own parent.He was always setting goals for himself.When he was nineteen, for example, and about to leave Kazan University before obtaining a degree, he set out a two-year educational plan for himself.He would study the following: “the entire course of judicial science needed for the final exam at the university … practical medicine and part of its theory … French, Russian, German, English, Italian and Latin … agriculture … history, geography and statistics … mathematics … music and painting … the natural sciences.”2 In addition, he intended to write a dissertation, as well as compositions on all the subjects which he studied.