Throughout the 1840s Tolstoy led a busy high society life, full of pleasure trips, salon parties and balls, hunting sprees and fleeting romances. He was described as "a handsome young man with blonde hair and a freshly coloured face" and was renowned for his physical strength, "bending spoons, forks and horse-shoes and driving nails into walls with one finger." One notable business trip to Kaluga in 1850 led to a close friendship with Nikolai Gogol (whom he first met in Frankfurt and then in Rome). Tolstoy recited to Gogol many of his yet unpublished poems and fragments from what later became the novel "Prince Serebryany". Gogol read him the second part of his novel "Dead Souls". Among other friendships he struck up in the forties were those with Ivan Aksakov, Pavel Annenkov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Panaev and Ivan Turgenev.