[T]he extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air — all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything - above all the swaying of the birch trees on the avenue — is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.
Letter to Sofya Tolstaya, Yasnaya Polyana, 3 May 18971
'BY HIS BIRTH, by his upbringing and by his manners, father was a real aristocrat. Despite the worker's blouse he invariably wore, despite his complete contempt for all the nobility's prejudices, he was a gentleman, and he remained a gentleman until the end of his days.'2 Thus Tolstoy's son Ilya summed up perhaps the greatest contradiction in the personality of a man whose whole life was a bundle of contradictions. For most of his life, Tolstoy never questioned his status as a barin (a landowning gentleman), and he was proud of his noble heritage. He continued to behave like an aristocrat long after he dropped his title and started wearing peasant clothes, because it was in his blood. 'Although he wore the dress of a peasant, he had neither the aspect nor the bearing of a peasant. Nomuzhik [peasant] ever had his piercing eyes or his air of composure and mastery,' wrote the economist James Mavor when reflecting on his meeting with the seventy-one-year-old writer in 1899.3 Whether it was someone seeing a weather-beaten peasant walking along a country road and noticing there was something about him which was 'out of keeping with his garb', as his American translator Isabel Hapgood commented,4 or the way in which Tolstoy invariably used the polite form of address when speaking to people, something defiantly aristocratic remained about his bearing.
Tolstoy certainly shared his family's deep reverence for their ancestors. He loved the myths that surrounded them, and the feeling of being connected to them through the generations. According to one Russian Tolstoy specialist, he was even convinced 'that he existed before he was born, that he was the product of all his ancestors who lived long before him'.5 That sense of being part of a continuum was indeed profoundly important for a writer whose life was so deeply bound up with his country's history. Tolstoy also loved the fact that he was constantly reminded of his family's past by the physical environment of Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where he spent the greater part of his life, and which, as his son Lev was to comment, he regarded as 'an organic part of himself'.6 His beloved home had been in his family for generations, it was where he was born, it was where he spent his early childhood, surrounded by family portraits, furniture and heirlooms, and it was really the only place where he was happy. It was fitting that he himself ultimately became an organic part of Yasnaya Polyana by being buried in the middle of its grounds. 'It is difficult for me to imagine Russia and my attitude to it without my Yasnaya Polyana', Tolstoy wrote in 1858, at the beginning of a projected essay about the summer he had spent the previous year on his estate. He explained that without Yasnaya Polyana he might understand certain general laws about Russia, but he would not love it with such a passion, and that this was the only form of love for the motherland that he knew.7
Tolstoy's cult of his ancestors may have been a badge of pride, and fundamental to his own sense of identity, but it also furnished the inspiration for his great novels. His abiding interest in the generation of the 1825 Decembrist Uprising, for example, which was the inspiration behind War and Peace, was in part fuelled by his being distantly related to Sergey Volkonsky, who had been one of its leaders and a hero of the war with Napoleon. Tolstoy actually met Volkonsky in Florence in i860. Volkonsky had recently returned from thirty years' exile in Siberia, having been amnestied by Alexander II and was by then an old man. Once Tolstoy began writing War and Peace three years later, it was his ancestors who became the indispensable prototypes of many of its memorable central characters. For this reason alone it is worth extending our view of Tolstoy's life back several generations.
Tolstoy was committed to truth in his fiction, but he never submitted his family history to the razor-edged rational analysis he applied to most other things. Thus he continued to believe into his dotage that his family was descended from a German immigrant called Dick. Amongst the books in his library were four volumes tracing the genealogies of Russia's most important aristocratic families,8 and Tolstoy believed what he read there — that his earliest ancestor came to Russia in the Middle Ages, and that his surname was simply a translation of dick, which means 'fat' in German.9 This is what Tolstoy often told foreign visitors who were curious to know about his family's history,10 and this is what was reproduced in the earliest biographies of the great writer. Evgeny Solovyov, for example (whose biography went on sale for twenty-five kopecks in 1894, when Tolstoy was sixty-six), explained that tolsty, the Russian word for 'fat' (stressed on the first syllable) had given rise to Tolstye - 'the Tolstoys'. From Tolstye had then come Tolstoy, with a stress on the second syllable.11
There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest this putative German immigrant who founded the Tolstoy dynasty ever existed, nor indeed was it ever accepted practice to translate foreign surnames into Russian in old Muscovy. The Tolstoy family's belief in its German provenance certainly ran deep, however. In the 1840s, 'Der Dicke' was what Nicholas I reputedly called General Count Pyotr Alexandrovich Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Nikolayevich who served as ambassador to Paris in the crucial years before the Napoleonic invasion. Maybe the Tsar was hoping to pay the Tolstoy family a compliment by alluding to its German origins, being himself a Germanophile. But perhaps it was just because the venerable count was rather portly.12
In another family legend it was supposedly a German called Indros who launched the Tolstoy dynasty. According to Russian annals of genealogy dating back to the seventeenth century, this Indros migrated from the Holy Roman Empire with two sons and 3,000 men in 1352, settled in Chernigov, changed his name to Leonty and converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Tolstoy's former secretary Nikolay Gusev wondered with good reason, however, how this feudal lord and his enormous retinue could have managed safely to cover hundreds of miles and cross several states usually at war with each other. Why did they attempt such a journey in the first place, and why should they have chosen the politically insignificant Chernigov as their destination? There is also the inconvenient fact that bubonic plague was raging in Rus in the mid-fourteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe, which was hardly an incentive to the pioneering spirit.13 Tolstoy's grandson Sergey Mikhailovich, who also subscribed to the peculiarly resilient family myth about its German origins, complicated the issue by suggesting Indris was actually a Flemish count called Henri de Mons who set off for Russia after an unsuccessful expedition to Cyprus.14 It does at least seem probable, however, that the Tolstoys could trace their lineage to this fabled progenitor's great grandson Andrey Kharitonovich, who brought the family to Moscow in the early fifteenth century and whose corpulence earned him the nickname which in time gave rise to the family's illustrious surname.
In 1682, when the old feudal hierarchical system was abolished, Russian noble families rushed to register their genealogy with the state in order to legitimise their claim to noble status. Another fact which casts doubt on the theory that the Tolstoys were descended from German immigrants is that nearly all the families who registered their genealogy claimed foreign ancestry (most of which was completely spurious), in the hope of enhancing their position, and also their standing with the Tsar.15 One of the six signatories who submitted the Tolstoys' early family history to the Russian heraldry office in Moscow in 1686 was the court servant Pyotr Andreyevich, who a few decades later would become the first Count Tolstoy. Pyotr Andreyevich was an exceptional individual, and the first Tolstoy to enter the history books, and he clearly also had creative talent, as he probably invented the story about his earliest ancestors, in which case the family talent for writing fiction can also be traced back several centuries.
Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645–1729) led a remarkable life. A man of immense energy, with a brilliant mind, he was also known to be treacherous, switching his political allegiance to the young Peter the Great soon after the latter wrested power from his half-sister Sofia in 1689. Pyotr Andreyevich played his cards skilfully. By 1697, at the age of fifty-two, and already a grandfather, he had demonstrated sufficient loyalty to be sent by Tsar Peter to Italy to study navigation and ship-building, along with many other scions of noble families. One of them was his near contemporary Boris Petrovich Sheremetev, who was rather higher up on the social ladder and travelled with an enormous retinue, including a scribe. Pyotr Tolstoy, by contrast, was accompanied by one soldier and one servant, and he wrote his own diary, which provides a far more interesting and informative account of Italian life seen through Russian eyes.
During his year and four months away, Pyotr Andreyevich travelled the length and breadth of Italy from Venice to Bari, and was able to study Italian life and social customs in some detail. Since he had come from 'Holy Mother Moscow', where secular culture was thin on the ground, it is not surprising to find a great deal of attention in his diary devoted to the Church. Pyotr Andreyevich came back to Moscow erudite and beardless, however, and the sight of a Russian Orthodox Christian without a beard probably shocked many of his contemporaries (the foundation of St Petersburg was still a few years off). Pyotr Tolstoy was one of the first Russians to don Western dress in the last years of old Muscovy. Years before Peter the Great began the wholesale import of Western culture into Russia, he could boast an impressive knowledge of European letters, as well as exquisite manners.16
In 1701, seeing his brilliant diplomatic potential, Peter appointed Pyotr Andreyevich as Russia's first ambassador to Constantinople. It was a tall order to hope to improve relations with the Sublime Porte, which fought three wars against Russia during the reign of Peter the Great alone, and Pyotr Tolstoy spent the last years of his posting languishing in the Yedikule ('Seven Towers') Fortress — the dungeon where foreign ambassadors whose countries were at war with the Ottoman Empire were traditionally incarcerated. But Tolstoy was clearly a restless man who needed to be engaged on something. Either before or after Sultan Ahmed III declared war in 1710, he drew on the knowledge of Latin he had acquired during his time in Italy to produce the first Russian translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
By the time Pyotr Tolstoy returned to Russia in 1714, Peter the Great had not only founded St Petersburg, but made it his new capital. Tolstoy accompanied the Tsar on further foreign trips, and then in 1717 was entrusted with the most delicate and challenging of missions. He was to go to Naples and persuade Peter's errant son Alexey, the heir to the throne, to return to Russia. Hostile to his father's reforms, Alexey had sought refuge in Vienna with his brother-in-law Emperor Charles VI, who stationed him out of harm's way in Naples in order to avert a diplomatic crisis. Pyotr Andreyevich had to resort to nefarious means, employing guile and cunning, and a great deal of disinformation, but his mission was successful. Upon his return to Russia the tsarevich Alexey was immediately thrown into the dungeon of the St Peter and Paul Fortress and interrogated for treason; he died soon afterwards.
Pyotr Tolstoy also took part in the interrogation. He did not endear himself to the Russian population at large, but was showered with riches by the grateful Tsar, who decorated him, appointed him senator and gave him extensive lands. By the time he was made a count, on the day of the coronation of Peter's wife Catherine I as Empress in 1724, the year before the Tsar's death, Pyotr Andreyevich was one of the most powerful men in Russia. But his machinations to ensure that Catherine's daughter Elizabeth succeeded her were to be his undoing. Following Catherine's death in 1727, Tolstoy's rival Menshikov had him arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the age of eighty-two, Pyotr Andreyevich was sentenced to death and summarily shorn of his title, his decorations and his lands. Shortly before his execution, Tolstoy's sentence was commuted to life exile in the Solovetsky Monastery prison, which was located on an island near the Arctic Circle. It was a month's journey away, and he was escorted there, as befitted his rank, by some 100 soldiers, first by land up to the port of Arkhangelsk, and then across the freezing waters of the White Sea. Here Tolstoy was kept in solitary confinement, forbidden to engage in correspondence, and only allowed out, in irons, to attend church services.
The Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea had been founded in the fifteenth century by two Stakhanovite monks who regarded life in a normal cloister too easy an option. They had sought instead a life of the utmost physical privation in emulation of the desert ascetics of early Christianity and found it on 'Solovki', the remote Solovetsky islands, where there is no daylight in deepest winter. The piety of the monastery's founding forefathers stood in stark contrast to the barbarity of Ivan the Terrible, who saw nothing untoward in establishing a prison in its sacred grounds. With its harsh climate, it was a particularly bleak place to serve a sentence. Pyotr Andreyevich's son Ivan, who accompanied him into exile, died the year after they arrived. Within eight months, Pyotr Andreyevich was also dead.
A century and a half later, in the 1870s, their descendant Lev Tolstoy became fascinated by this chapter of his family history while planning a novel set in the times of Peter the Great. Writing to his friend and relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in June 1879, when he was making notes on the case in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Justice, he declared that the exile of Pyotr and Ivan was the 'darkest episode' in the lives of their ancestors. For him, the time of Peter the Great was the 'beginning of everything', and he became so interested in Pyotr Andreyevich's fate that he thought seriously for a while about visiting his place of exile that summer, in the hope of finding out more about him.17 By this time the monastery had become one of the most sacred places in Russia (and was attracting around 20,000 pilgrims each year),18 but in the 1870s it was still not an easy place to get to. Tolstoy heard more about Solovki at this time from a peasant storyteller from northern Russia who shared with him the popular legend of the Three Elders.
In 1886, as part of his mission to provide the masses with high-quality reading matter, Tolstoy reworked the story for a popular weekly journal. It is a typically subversive work, in keeping with the ideas he had begun to develop at the time. The story is about the events which take place during a journey to the monastery on one of the boats ferrying pilgrims to the islands from Arkhangelsk. A bishop asks to be set down on an island inhabited by three legendary 'holy men' whom he wants to meet. To his consternation, their modest, unconventional and practical Christianity proves to contain more holiness than the 'official' Church dogma he tries to inculcate them with. The bishop is humbled by his meeting with the Three Elders. Such provocative ideas caused Tolstoy to become the Russian government's greatest threat. He was so determined to expose the lies and hypocrisy he saw embedded in the fabric of the tsarist system that he positively hoped he could emulate his ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich, but the government refused to allow him to become a martyr. Alexander III once famously remarked, 'Tolstoy wants me to exile him to Solovki, but I am not going to give him the publicity.'19 After the 1917 Revolution Solovki became one of the Soviet Union's most notorious concentration camps, and it is grimly ironic that some of Tolstoy's followers ended up there in 1930 simply for refusing to give up their beliefs about non-resistance to violence and the abolition of private property.20
Fourteen children were born to Tolstoy and his wife Sonya during their long marriage, but Lev Nikolayevich was not the first Tolstoy to have so many offspring. Pyotr Andreyevich's eldest son Ivan had five sons and five daughters before he died in the Solovetsky prison at the age of forty-three in 1728, and the second son was Andrey Ivanovich (1721–1803). This was Tolstoy's great-grandfather, about whom not much is known beyond the fact that he was christened 'Big Nest' because he had twenty-three children, twelve of whom reached adulthood.21 Tolstoy's aunt once told him that Andrey Ivanovich had married at such a young age that he apparently burst into tears when his equally young wife Alexandra went to a ball one evening without saying goodbye to him.22
In 1741 Catherine I's daughter Elizabeth finally became Empress, as Pyotr Andreyevich had hoped, and at some point in her reign, she returned one of the Tolstoy family estates to his son Ivan Petrovich's widow. In 1760 the remaining properties and Pyotr Andreyevich's title were finally restored.23 It would have been at this time that the Tolstoy family crest was designed, consisting of a shield supported by two borzoi dogs, signifying loyalty and swiftness in attaining results. The shield, divided into seven segments, features at its centre a crossed gold sword and a silver arrow running through a golden key, as a symbol of the family's long history. In the top left-hand corner is half of the Russian imperial eagle, and next to it on a silver background is the blue St Andrew Cross which Pyotr Andreyevich was awarded in 1722. In the bottom right-hand corner the seven towers topped with crescents recall Pyotr Andreyevich's incarceration in Constantinople's Yedikule Fortress, and his role in securing Russian victory over the Turks.24
Count Andrey Ivanovich Tolstoy, as he now became at the age of thirty-nine, was a loyal servant of the state. He was also clearly fiscally astute, as by the time of his death in 1803 the family's fortunes had begun to improve. The profligate and sybaritic ways of Tolstoy's grandfather, Ilya Andreyevich (1757–1820), however, ensured the family was soon impecunious again. Ilya Andreyevich followed the conventional career path at this time for Russian noblemen, who were still required to serve: he went into the army. After retiring in his thirties, he got married, and he married well: he and his wife Pelageya Nikolayevna (1762–1838) had at their disposal not only a Moscow mansion, but also extensive properties in Tula province. They chose to make their home in their 5,500-acre Polyany estate, which came with hundreds of serfs, an aviary and orchards. The couple lived in some style: the sterlet served at their table came fresh from the White Sea via Arkhangelsk, the oysters were imported from Holland, while asparagus and pineapples were grown in the huge greenhouses they built on their lands. According to one family legend, the count even despatched his linen to Amsterdam to be laundered. Tolstoy describes their life as one long succession of 'parties, theatres, balls, dinners, excursions'.25
Ilya Andreyevich was hospitable and generous, but not terribly well educated: when he parted from his wife for the first time in twenty years in 1813, he wrote her a letter riddled with spelling mistakes, and almost totally lacking in punctuation. A brief extract might be rendered in English thus: 'Sadd very sadd my dear friend Countess Pelageya Nikolayevna to congratulate you on your absent name-day for the first time in my life but whatcanbe done friend of my heart but necesery to submit to reason.'26 Pelageya, for her part, spoke better French than Russian, and that was the limit of her education according to her grandson, who bucked the family tradition by acquiring 22,000 volumes for his personal library.27
Throughout his writing career, Tolstoy pillaged his family history for creative material to use in developing his fictional characters, and it is not hard to see shades of Ilya Andreyevich and Pelageya Nikolayevna behind the august figures of Count and Countess Rostov in War and Peace. Tolstoy actually named his grandfather in his early drafts, referring to him as 'kind and stupid'. His subsequent notes for the character of Count Ilya Rostov also correspond very closely to Ilya Andreyevich, who was also a stalwart of the English Club in Moscow. Tolstoy's account of the lavish dinner Count Rostov hosts there in War and Peace is based on sources describing the dinner for 300 which Ilya Andreyevich hosted in 1806 in honour of Bagration's defeat of Napoleon at Schongraben. Ilya Andreyevich was certainly somewhat larger than life. As Tolstoy has recorded, his penchant for placing large bets at games of whist and ombre without being actually able to play, his readiness to give money to anyone who asked him for a loan, and his extravagant lifestyle eventually led to him becoming mired in debt, and in 1815 he was forced to take a job.
The card-playing, and consequently the debts, continued during the five undistinguished years that Ilya Andreyevich served as governor of Kazan, and a succession of poor business deals further increased his debt to 500,000 roubles by 1819. In February 1820 he was dismissed from his post on charges of corruption (which were probably trumped-up — it seems to have been his wife who secretly took bribes). Ilya Andreyevich never recovered from this blow, and he died within the month. Tolstoy inherited his grandfather's gambling habit, and his habit of staking and losing large sums, but he was fortunately able to curb both by the time he got married.
Tolstoy's father, Nikolay Ilyich, born in 1794, was the eldest of Ilya Andreyevich's and Pelageya Nikolayevna's four sons, and very different. When surveying his dismal financial prospects, Ilya Andreyevich realised his son would probably have to work for his living, and so he enrolled Nikolay in the civil service when he was six years old. This meant that when he reached sixteen, he automatically received the rank of collegiate registrar, which placed him on the bottom rung of the civil service ladder. In keeping with his kindly character, Ilya Andreyevich did not beat his children, which was highly unusual, as even the children of the imperial family were subject to corporal punishment at this time. Otherwise, Tolstoy's father had a fairly conventional upbringing for a Russian nobleman in early nineteeth-century Russia. When he was fifteen his aunt gave him Afanasy Petrov to be his personal servant, and the following year his parents gave him a peasant girl for his 'health', as it was euphemistically put at the time. This resulted in the birth of Mishenka, Tolstoy's illegitimate brother, who was trained to work in the postal service, but then apparently 'lost his way'. Tolstoy later found it disconcerting to encounter this poverty-stricken elder brother who was more like their father than any of them.28 He too would in turn have an illegitimate son, whom his children felt resembled him more closely than they did.
When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy naturally left the civil service to join the army, fighting with distinction before being taken captive by the French. He was unable to afford to serve long in the prestigious and costly Cavalry Guards regiment to which he was transferred when he returned to St Petersburg in 1814, however, and then a combination of disillusionment with the military, ill-health and his father's parlous financial situation led him to resign his commission. Since civil servants could not be sent to debtors' prison, Nikolay Ilyich was obliged to take a job, and this became particularly necessary after the death of his father in 1820 left him as the sole provider for his sybaritic, spoiled mother, unmarried sister and cousin. After all the debts had been paid off, the family could afford only to rent a small flat in Moscow. When Tolstoy describes the position Nikolay Rostov finds himself in after the death of the old count in War and Peace, he is essentially telling the story of his father, who in 1821 took up a very minor appointment in Moscow's military bureaucracy. The magic solution for Tolstoy's father, as for Nikolay Rostov, was a rich bride. In the novel she appears as Princess Maria Bolkonskaya; in real life she was Princess Maria Volkonskaya. It was through Maria Volkonskaya that Nikolay Ilyich's family came to be connected with Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate which would be irrevocably linked to Tolstoy's name.
Tolstoy's family pedigree meant a great deal to him. The passage in Part Two of Anna Karenina in which the old-world Russian noble Levin scoffs at nouveau riche aristocrats like Vronsky, who lack breeding and cannot point back to three or four generations, expresses a fair degree of his own snobbery. Also very telling is Levin's contempt for the merchants he has to deal with — the up-and-coming Russian middle class. The aristocratic Tolstoy also had no time for merchants, and the fact that he invariably chose nobles or peasants to be his artistic heroes says a lot about his prejudices — he regarded the peasantry as the 'best class' in Russia. Compared to the Volkonskys, who were descended from the legendary Scandinavian settler Ryurik, the ninth-century founder of Russia, the Tolstoys were actually mere parvenus as a noble family. Tolstoy's maternal ancestors came from some of the most venerable and distinguished families in Russia, but his paternal lineage did not actually go back all that far when compared with some of the great families of western Europe. As a Tolstoy, he was a count, but this was a title imported from Germany by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, along with that of baron, as part of his Europeanisation programme. These titles, which were a reward for service, furthermore kept their original German names, Graf and Baron. The Russian tradition of each child inheriting the family title, rather than just the eldest son, meant that there were soon hundreds of counts and barons mingling with the old-world Russian princes and princesses.
Tolstoy's mother Princess Maria Volkonskaya could trace her roots back at least to the thirteenth century, when one of her early ancestors was involved in altercations with the Mongol overlords of old Rus. A century later the family took its surname from the Volkona river in the area near Kaluga and Tula where they had lands. In 1763, when he retired from the army, Tolstoy's maternal great-grandfather Major General Sergey Volkonsky bought a share of the Yasnaya Polyana property, south of Tula. Later he bought out the other five part-owners. Yasnaya Polyana, meaning 'Clear Glade', received its name for a very specific reason. In the sixteenth century, when the Muscovite state needed to stave off attacks from nomadic invaders such as the Crimean Tatars, it was able to make the most of a series of natural fortifications along its southern borders in the form of forests and rivers. Vulnerable border areas were strengthened by cutting down trees to form a solid barricade, known as a zaseka. The Kozlova Zaseka (named after a military leader called Kozlov) ran for several hundred miles, with clearings at various points which had gateways and access roads. Yasnaya Polyana was located in one of these clearings. It was originally called 'Yasennaya Polyana', because ash trees (yaseni) once grew there.29
Tolstoy's grandfather Nikolay Sergeyevich Volkonsky (1753–1821) inherited Yasnaya Polyana in 1784, and it was he who transformed it from a fairly ordinary piece of land into a carefully landscaped estate, complete with ponds, gardens, paths and imposing manor house when he retired from the army in 1799. Until the age of forty-six, Nikolay Sergeyevich had served in the army, having been signed up for military service when he was six. He was a guards captain in Catherine the Great's retinue when she met Emperor Joseph II at Mogilev in 1780, and fought in the two victorious Russo-Turkish Wars which took place during her reign. After serving briefly as Russian ambassador in Berlin, he accompanied his victorious sovereign on her triumphant tour of the Crimea in 1787 and he was promoted to brigadier and then general-in-chief. In 1794 he was suddenly sent on compulsory leave for two years. According to Tolstoy family lore, this was because Volkonsky had refused to marry Varvara von Engelgardt, the niece and mistress of Prince Potemkin, the great favourite of Catherine the Great. Volkonsky's brilliant career now came to a sudden halt, and he was more or less sent into exile by being appointed military governor in distant Arkhangelsk. Tolstoy greatly admired his grandfather's feistiness, and he clearly enjoyed reproducing Nikolay Sergeyevich's alleged reaction to Potemkin's plan in his memoirs ('Why does he think I am going to marry his wh...'). It was a story he loved to recount to his guests, and he even upbraided two early biographers for omitting it from their manuscripts.30 The truth was, as usual, far more prosaic, as Potemkin had died in 1791 and Volkonsky was not posted to Arkhangelsk until 1798, by which time Catherine had been succeeded by her son Paul I. At some point in the late 1780s (information is sparse), Nikolay Sergeyevich appears to have married Princess Ekaterina Trubetskaya (1749—1792) in a marriage of convenience. His wife died at the age of forty-three, leaving a two-year-old daughter, Maria Nikolayevna.This was Tolstoy's mother.
![[Image]](tolstoy-a-russian-life.files/image006.jpg)
I. Portrait of Tolstoy's maternal grandfather, Nikolay Sergeyevich Volkonsky
It was Paul I's notoriously difficult temperament and constant fault-finding which ultimately prompted Volkonsky to resign permanently from the army in 1799 and retire to his country estate. He never remarried. For the remaining two decades of his life he devoted himself to the upbringing of his beloved daughter Maria, and to creating the idyllic surroundings for them to live in at Yasnaya Polyana which would in turn become instrumental to his grandson's creativity. Volkonsky left one reminder of his military posting in the far north: he built a summer cottage on the banks of the Voronka river, near to Yasnaya Polyana, and named it 'Grumant'. This was the Russian name at that time for Spitsbergen. Volkonsky was governor of Arkhangelsk, the gateway to the Arctic, and also of Spitsbergen, which had originally been discovered by fishermen and hunters from the area near Arkhangelsk. A village grew up around Volkonsky's cottage which was also called Grumant, but the local peasants, for whom this was a very odd-sounding name, renamed it Ugryumy ('Gloomy'). Tolstoy came here as a boy to fish in the pond.31
The early nineteenth century was the golden age of the Russian country estate, and Nikolay Volkonsky was not alone in wanting to retreat from the official world associated with St Petersburg and the court, and go back to nature. Russian aristocrats had been rediscovering their roots ever since the 1760s, when the nobility began to be progressively freed from the compulsory state service that Peter the Great had introduced in order to drive through his ambitious programme of reform and Europeanisation. With vast swathes of property now in private hands, manor houses began springing up all over the Russian countryside, some of them grand classical mansions, others more humble wooden affairs. The house in which Tolstoy was born was somewhere between the two. The Yasnaya Polyana estate was not quite a tabula rasa when Nikolay Volkonsky took up permanent residence there. In the early eighteenth century, guided by the vogue for straight lines and geometrical precision which characterised the new city of St Petersburg, previous owners had established the main part of the estate in its north-eastern corner, and had constructed two rows of wooden dwellings and a formal garden with lime trees. They had also built a long straight avenue leading from the main house to the entrance of the property, near the main road to Tula.
Volkonsky had grand plans for Yasnaya Polyana, but he needed to find a good architect first, and principal construction work began only after 1810. He decided the main manor house should be at the highest point of the property, facing the south-east. It would be flanked by two identical, two-storey wings, each containing ten rooms. These were built first, with wooden decking leading to the main house. Only the first floor of the manor house was completed in Volkonsky's lifetime. The second storey, which was built in wood to save costs, was added by Tolstoy's father in 1824. It was a house in the classical empire style so beloved in Russia in the early nineteenth century, with thirty-two rooms and a façade graced by an eight-column central portico.
Over time, another nineteen buildings appeared in the grounds, a few of which were built in brick, such as the ice house and a threshing barn, but most in wood. They joined a classically proportioned building already standing, which had been used to house a small carpet factory. Later it accommodated the family's servants, and became known as the 'Volkonsky House'. Nikolay Sergeyevich was kept busy. Apart from the main family house he built stables, a coach-house, further living quarters for the servants, a bath-house and a summer-house. He also built two orangeries, linked by a gallery, in which to grow exotic fruits for his table such as melons and peaches. This gallery (which burned down in 1867) was a favourite haunt for Tolstoy when he was growing up. To judge from an evocative passage in his early work Youth, on summer nights he liked to come and sleep in the gallery, from where he could see the lights in the main house gradually being extinguished, listen to the sounds of the night and feel he was part of nature.
Nikolay Sergeyevich seems to have had a finely tuned aesthetic sense. Tolstoy records proudly in his memoirs that what he built was not 'only solid and comfortable but extremely elegant'.32 Volkonsky also brought his taste and discernment to bear on the landscaping of the property. First of all he built a ha-ha running round its perimeter, then some iron gates at the front entrance positioned between two large round white towers.33 These were hollow so that the watchman could seek shelter during inclement weather. Then, as now, the gates opened on to an avenue lined with birch trees leading up to the manor house, which was wide enough for a troika or a coach and four. This was the famous 'Preshpekt', and a similar driveway is mentioned in War and Peace in the description of the Bolkonsky estate Bald Hills, which bears many similarities to Yasnaya Polyana.
Volkonsky laid a lawn in front of the main house, which he edged with two tree-lined paths running parallel to the main avenue, but he kept the French-style miniature park of pollarded lime trees. The park was given the name "The Wedges" due to the network of paths traversing it in a 'square and star' formation. Soon the natural song of nightingales and orioles who liked to cluster in the branches of the park's densely planted trees was augmented by music performed by Volkonsky's serfs, who had been specially trained for the purpose. According to Tolstoy, Volkonsky loathed hunting, but he loved plants, flowers and music, and kept a small orchestra for his and his daughter's entertainment. By the standards of someone like Count Sheremetev, who maintained a company of singers, dancers and musicians, and staged full-scale theatrical performances of the latest French operas, or Prince Naryshkin, who had enough serfs to play in a forty-piece horn band, with each playing only one note, Volkonsky's artistic ambitions were quite modest. It was nevertheless common for Russian landowners to train their more talented serfs to perform for them.34 One day, long after his grandfather's death, Tolstoy found some wooden benches and stands arranged round an enormous elm tree in the park: this was where Volkonsky liked to stroll in the early morning to the accompaniment of music en plein air. As soon as the prince left the park, the orchestra would fall silent, and the musicians would go back to their normal duties digging the garden or feeding the pigs. In one of the drafts for War and Peace Tolstoy describes eight bewigged serfs in jackets and stockings standing on the gravel in the middle of the park, surrounded by lilac and rose bushes, tuning their instruments at seven in the morning, ready to burst into a Haydn symphony the minute they receive word that their master is awake.
As the nineteenth century wore on, the passion amongst aristocratic Russian landowners for the regularity of formal gardens in the style of Louis XIV was superseded by an enthusiasm for more 'natural' English landscaping. Nikolay Sergeyevich shared this enthusiasm. His next project was to create a much wilder 'English park' from the sloping contours of the lower part of the estate by the entrance towers. Volkonsky also created a cascade of ponds, whose banks were planted with rose bushes. Tolstoy enjoyed walking in this part of Yasnaya Polyana because it was where his mother most liked to spend her time. It was in her memory in 1898 that he restored the little gazebo on stilts from where she used to watch the traffic passing on the road outside. Later on, she would sit there waiting for her husband to come home. It was Maria Volkonskaya who planted the silver poplars round the edge of the Middle Pond, and the shrubs and fir trees lower down. On the other side of the entrance towers was the Big Pond, half of which was traditionally given over for use by the local peasants.
One thing missing from the traditional estate ensemble at Yasnaya Polyana was a church. Possibly this was because Nikolay Sergeyevich believed his family could rely on the church down the road, where his ashes were transferred in 1928. As a student of Voltaire, however, and a child of his time, it is more likely that he simply had no interest in building a church. This did not prevent him having dozens of theological books in his library, not to mention a twenty-volume edition of the Bible and accompanying exegesis. They sat next to works by Racine, Virgil, Montaigne, Rousseau, Homer, Plutarch and Vasari, to mention just some of the authors collected by Nikolay Sergeyevich. There were also plenty of books which he bought for the education of his daughter.35
The Russian country estate was many things — family seat, arena for artistic performance, rural retreat — but it was also a centre of agricultural production. As such, it reinforced the patriarchal ways which impeded Russia's modernisation, since the arcadian idyll of the country estate was made possible by the peasants who sustained it. In terms of his wealth in human beings, that is to say, serfs, Volkonsky was a middle-ranking aristocrat, since he only had 159 'souls' at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was in the majority. In early nineteenth-century Russia only three per cent of the nearly 900,000 members of the nobility owned more than 500 serfs. Nevertheless, it was free labour, and the peasants got a very raw deal, particularly after 1762, when the nobility were 'emancipated' from state service. The serfs had to wait another hundred years before they were emancipated in 1861. Until then, they were unable to own property, and could not marry without the permission of their owner, who had the right to subject them to corporal punishment or exile them to Siberia at whim.
There were some Russian landowners who abused their unlimited powers, and treated their serfs with unimaginable cruelty. Nikolay Volkonsky was not one of those. Like other landowners, he treated Yasnaya Polyana as his own private kingdom but was, it seems, only mildly despotic. He may have forced his musicians to double up as swineherds, but he did not beat them. He may have had a succession of children with his servant Alexandra, whom he sent off to the orphanage, but he did not keep a harem as some landowners did. Volkonsky's relationship with his serfs features heavily in Tolstoy's memoir of his grandfather, whom he clearly idolised. He recalls, for example, how his grandfather built fine accommodation for his servants, and ensured they were not only well fed and dressed but also entertained. 'My grandfather was considered a very strict master,' he wrote, on the basis of his conversations with some of the older Yasnaya Polyana peasants, 'but I never heard any stories of his cruel behaviour or punishments, so usual at that time.'36 At the same time he admitted that his grandfather probably did overstep the mark on occasion. Later on in his memoirs, he recalls Nikolay Sergeyevich's particular fondness for Praskovya Isayevna, the housekeeper, who represented the 'mysterious old world' of Yasnaya Polyana. If Tolstoy based old Natalya Savishna in Childhood on her as faithfully he claims in his memoirs, then at a much earlier stage of her life, when she had been halfway along her career path from maid to housekeeper and was working as a nanny, Praskovya was banished by Nikolay Volkonsky to work in a cowshed in a distant estate in the steppes. Her crime had been to fall in love with one of Prince Volkonsky's footmen, and to have asked Nikolay Sergeyevich's permission to marry him. She proved so irreplaceable, however, that within six months, she was brought back and installed in her former position, at which she apparently fell at Prince Volkonsky's feet and begged for forgiveness.
Maria Volkonskaya was seven when her father took her to live in Yasnaya Polyana, and it would be her home for the rest of her life. Until then, she had barely known her father, who had been away in the army, but he devoted a great deal of time to her during the lonely years of his retirement, and paid particular attention to her education. Four handwritten textbooks containing materials written out by a scribe for Maria Nikolayevna when she was in her teens indicate what her father's priorities were — and also his expectations. She studied mathematics and astronomy (the authorities here being Pythagoras, Plato, Ptolemy and the ancient Babylonians), forms of government (including despotic, monarchical and democratic), classics (the letters of Pliny the Younger were a major source), and agriculture.37 Tolstoy's mother also took a keen interest in the natural world. In 1821, when she was thirty-one, she compiled a detailed 'description of the orchard' at Yasnaya Polyana, naming each of the sixteen varieties of apple growing there. Another time she described what was blooming at Yasnaya Polyana in July: poppies, sweet william, stock, marigold and delphinium.38
Maria Nikolayevna had a good knowledge of five languages, including Russian, which was not all that common amongst upper-class Russian women at that time, for whom French was their first language. In his memoirs Tolstoy also records that his mother was an accomplished pianist, artistically sensitive, and a born storyteller. Apparently her tales were so compelling that the friends who gathered round at balls preferred listening to her to dancing. She wrote many of them down, as well as poems, odes and elegies. One unfinished story is called 'The Russian Pamela, or There are No Rules Without Exceptions'. Inspired by Samuel Richardson's famous 1740 novel about a maid whose virtue is rewarded with marriage to her late mistress's son, Maria's Russian version incorporates a young serf girl being given her freedom before she can marry her noble suitor, Prince Razumin. The character of Prince Razumin (whose name means 'Reason') is clearly a thinly disguised portrait of her father. He is described as a man with an excellent mind and noble in spirit, who imposes very strict rules but has a kind, sensitive heart. He is a man who knows his own worth, demands respect and obedience from his subordinates and high standards from his children, considers himself superior to others and is proud of his high birth. A similar portrait would emerge when Tolstoy sat down to describe the character of old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, although there were some important fundamental differences — Maria Nikolayevna was a devoted daughter like Princess Maria Bolkonskaya, but did not live in a state of discord with her father, as far as can be ascertained from her diary and other sources.39
Very little is known about Maria Nikolayevna's childhood and adolescence, and next to nothing is known about her early adulthood. Nikolay Volkonsky took his daughter for a six-week stay in St Petersburg when she was twenty, so she could be presented in society. She kept a diary, recording her impressions of the Romanov tombs in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral, the paintings by Raphael and Rubens in the galleries of the Hermitage, and the ballet, but there is otherwise scant information about her life at this time. The Volkonskys stayed in the capital with the recently widowed Princess Varvara Golitsyna, with whose family Nikolay Sergeyevich had become very friendly. Portraits were exchanged as Maria Nikolayevna had been betrothed from childhood to one of the Golitsyns' ten sons, but he died of fever before the wedding. Tolstoy believed his mother experienced a profound sense of loss when her fiancé died. (Supposedly, his name was Lev and Tolstoy was named after him, but this is just another family legend that Tolstoy subscribed to, for there was no Lev Golitsyn.)
The second most important emotional attachment formed by Tolstoy's mother seems to have been with her French companion Louise Henissienne, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana from 1819 to 1822. Maria Nikolayevna had already shown a desire for social justice unusual for her time by writing a story about a serf who is given her freedom, and she also befriended a young peasant girl at Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon after her father's death in 1821 she proceeded to cause a scandal in Moscow by selling one of her estates and putting the proceeds in Louise Henissienne's name. The 'ugly old maid' with the 'heavy eyebrows', as malicious tongues referred to Maria Nikolayevna in letters, then created further scandal by arranging for her cousin Mikhail Volkonsky to marry Marie, the sister of her French companion. The following year she almost gave away her Oryol estate to Marie, finally giving her husband 75,000 roubles instead.40 Maria Nikolayevna's relatives found this wilful, headstrong behaviour shocking. Her youngest son Lev would have heartily approved, however. In due course, he would give away all his property.
Tolstoy was bewitched his whole life by thoughts of the mother he never knew, and was almost glad no portrait of her survived, as it meant he could concentrate his mind on her 'spiritual image'. Her old maid Tatyana Filippovna told him when he was growing up that his mother had been self-possessed and reserved, but also hot-tempered. He treasured the idea of her blushing and shedding tears before uttering a rude word, although did not believe she even knew any rude words. And he was convinced that his eldest brother Nikolay probably inherited her best qualities - an unwillingness to judge, and extreme modesty. At the age of thirty-two, Maria Nikolayevna probably thought she would never marry, but she was then introduced by relatives to Nikolay Tolstoy, who was four years her junior and a distant relative (her great-grandmother Praskovya was his great-aunt). She was wealthy; he was in need of money. They were not in love, but they married in June 1822.