Biography | Leo Tolstoy — Struck Off the Rolls at Kazan University

People treat Tolstoy as a man who walked out of a lecture hall already a novelist.

The record at this university is thinner and more ordinary.

In late May and early June 1844 he sat the entrance tests for Imperial Kazan University with the gymnasium candidates.

He scored well in French, Turkish-Tatar, algebra and Russian literature, and failed history and geography.

After a retake authorised by the rector, he was enrolled on 3 October 1844 in the Oriental literature section of the Faculty of Philosophy.

The main building on Kremlyovskaya Street, finished in the 1820s and still the face of the university, is where those faculties sat.

Eastern languages did not hold him. At the half-year tests of 1844–45 he was barred from the transfer exams.

On 25 August 1845 he petitioned to move to the Faculty of Law. He was accepted.

On the first-year law course he worked more steadily and was one of eleven students, out of twenty-two, who advanced.

He attended lectures by Dmitry Meyer and others, and spent a stretch of time comparing Catherine's Nakaz with Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws.

On 12 April 1847, as a second-year law student, he sent a petition to Rector Ivan Mikhailovich Simonov.

He asked to be struck off the student list and to have his papers returned, citing disordered health and domestic circumstances.

The university council resolved to remove him and issue a certificate of attendance.

On 23 April 1847 he left Kazan.

He had lived in the city since 1841, first with his aunt Pelageya Yushkova, later in rented rooms.

He took no degree. The diaries that begin around this departure are the first long record of the self-examination that later filled the novels.

The building on this street is still a working university. The student who left it did the work that made his name two hundred kilometres south, at Yasnaya Polyana.

Photo: main building of Kazan University from Kremlyovskaya Street, Mikh Luna, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons