Three months earlier, on November 19th, 1855, Lieutenant Tolstoy had arrived in St Petersburg by train. He remained there for most of the next six months. While Moscow's thinkers focused primarily on the war, St Petersburg's intellectuals seemed more concerned with political reform.

Although the Neva remained frozen throughout most of Tolstoy's stay, the spirit of the capital and Russia itself seemed to be experiencing a thaw after the frozen immobility of Nicholas's final years. Signs of renewed life were sprouting up everywhere. New journals were begun. Previously forbidden works were now printed. As Tolstoy later wrote: “Everyone tried to discover still new questions, everyone tried to resolve them; people wrote, read and spoke about projects; everyone wished to correct, destroy and change things, and all Russians, as if a single person, found themselves in an indescribable state of enthusiasm.”

Tolstoy came to the capital to meet the leading literary men of his day. One of the most prominent was Ivan Turgenev, the author of A Sportsman's Sketches, a work applauded for its humane depiction of the Russian peasants. Turgenev had just recently completed a draft of a novel, based in part on the life of a friend, Michael Bakunin, a radical currently in prison. Almost immediately after arriving at the train station, Tolstoy headed for the large first floor apartment of Turgenev. It was just off the Nevsky Prospect near the Anichkov Palace, where the widow of Nicholas I now resided.