Levin could barely remember his mother. His idea of her was a sacred memory for him.
Anna Karenina, Part One, Chapter 271
WHEN, TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, visitors to Yasnaya Polyana asked Tolstoy where exactly he was born, he sometimes pointed to the tip of a tall larch growing amongst a clump of trees next to his house. He was not suffering from dementia, nor was he born at the top of a tree, but indicating precisely the former location of his mother's bedroom on the first floor of the columned mansion built by his grandfather Nikolay Volkonsky, where he spent his early childhood.2 Despite this being the happiest period in his life, and despite his almost fetishistic reverence of his ancestors, particularly his maternal grandfather, Tolstoy sold off his ancestral home in 1854 after heavy gambling losses. The main house did not completely disappear: the neighbouring landowner who bought it dismantled it brick by brick and then rebuilt it on his property about twenty miles down the road. When Tolstoy came back to live permanently at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1850s, he moved into one of the two wings Volkonsky had built on either side of the house and planted some maples and larches in the gaping space between them. Many decades later Tolstoy's children developed a passionate desire to return their father's house to its original location between the two wings. It was a harebrained scheme that came to nothing, but in 1897, when he was sixty-nine, Tolstoy rode over to look at the house again, and seeing it brought back a flood of memories. He walked through its dilapidated rooms and came to a halt in one of the bedrooms. 'This is where I was born,' he said, thinking about his mother and the blissful days of his early childhood.3
Tolstoy could not remember his mother, who died before he was two years old, but her idealised image was a constant presence throughout his life, right up until his last years. He openly admitted to one of his early biographers in 1906 that he had aculte of his mother, and as an old man was still thinking about her when he went on his solitary morning walks round the estate.4 In the memoirs he wrote when he was in his seventies, Tolstoy confesses he had often prayed to her soul to help him at moments of temptation when he was younger. Even in his eighties he could not talk about her without crying. On days when he felt particularly melancholy at the end of his life, he still had an intense longing to curl up and be comforted by his mother, who represented for him a 'supreme image of pure love'.5
By the time Tolstoy was born in 1828, Yasnaya Polyana was getting quite crowded. Maria Nikolayevna had led a mostly secluded and solitary life on the estate while her father was alive. After her marriage to Nikolay Tolstoy in 1822, however, her husband brought various members of his family to live with them. Apart from his venerable mother Pelageya Nikolayevna, by then sixty, there was his younger sister Alexandra Ilyinichna ('Aline'), who was twenty-seven, and so five years younger than Maria Nikolayevna. Aline came with a ward, Pashenka, who was then about five years old. There was also 'Toinette', his distant 'aunt' Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskaya (pronounced 'Yorgelskaya'). Her father had been Tolstoy's grandmother's cousin, and she was thirty — three years younger than Maria Nikolayevna. All these women were to be important figures in Tolstoy's life, particularly Aunt Toinette, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana after he inherited the estate. She died when he was in his late forties, and represented a precious link to the parents he lost when he was very young. Three other members of the family also took up residence at Yasnaya Polyana before Tolstoy was born: his elder brothers Nikolay, Sergey and Dmitry, born in 1823, 1826 and 1827, respectively.
Nikolay occupied a special place in his mother's affections as her first-born. Anxious to inculcate her son with obedience and the right moral qualities, she kept a detailed diary of his behaviour from the age of four, and expressed displeasure at the first sign he showed of cowardice or laziness. She also deplored manifestations of sentimentality, such as when Nikolay shed tears after reading about a bird being shot, or when he was frightened by a beetle. Maria Nikolayevna wanted her son to be brave, stoic and patriotic, and she allowed him to wear a sabre as a reward for good behaviour. She also discouraged vanity. Turgenev, with whom Nikolay was friendly many years later, would remark that unlike his youngest brother Lev he indeed completely lacked the abundance of vanity necessary for anyone wishing to become a writer.6
When Lev was born on 28 August 1828, the youngest of four sons, he replaced Nikolay as the chief and final object of his mother's affections according to Aunt Toinette.7 His mother's nickname for him was 'mon petit Benjamin', but he was christened Lev, the Russian form of Leo. Unlike her father, Maria Nikolayevna was deeply religious, and thought carefully about the names of her children. After her fifth (and final) child was born, she commissioned a small icon featuring images of their five namesakes, and St Leo the Great is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner. Tolstoy's Christian name certainly seems to have been well chosen: he shared with the fifth-century St Leo (only one of two Popes to be called 'The Great') not only noble birth but an astonishing fearlessness. Pope Leo is known to have ridden out to the gates of Rome to confront Attila the Hun, whom he persuaded to abandon his idea of invading Europe. Tolstoy fought with bravery while he was in the army, and once wrestled with a bear while he was out hunting. He also shared literary distinction with his illustrious namesake: St Leo founded what would become an influential prose style called cursus leonicus.
Maria Nikolayevna may also have had in mind the exclusively Orthodox St Leo of Catania when she named her last son, and Lev proved to have even more in common with him. This St Leo is sometimes confused with the other St Leo, but seems to have been a more familiar figure in Russian folklore. It was well known, for example, that one should not look at shooting stars on St Leo's day — peasants associated Lev katanskii with the verb katat', meaning to roll (along).8 St Leo of Catania was a bishop who originally came from a noble family in Ravenna. He chose to turn his back on his wealthy background to devote his life to preaching Christianity and serving the poor, and was particularly known for his kindness to pilgrims and beggars. Tolstoy's life followed a similar pattern, and like Bishop Leo, he came into direct conflict with his government during his lifetime. If St Leo was persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Byzantine Empire for vehemently opposing the destruction of holy images during the iconoclast controversy in the eighth century, however, Lev Tolstoy was the scourge of the Russian Empire for being himself an iconoclast and respecting no authority, including, most famously, the Orthodox Church. Curiously, both St Leo of Catania and Lev Tolstoy were opposed at the end of their lives by apostates called Heliodoros (Iliodor in Russian), who were the cause of great scandals. St Leo's adversary tried to lure Christians away with the help of the occult, while the renegade Russian monk Iliodor saw Tolstoy as the devil in human form, and only later came to repent. It is curious that Tolstoy began a story called 'Father Iliodor' in 1909, at the very end of his life, just when the monk Iliodor was causing his greatest scandals.9
Tolstoy was born in 1828, on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month in the year, and twenty-eight became his lucky number. He had become so superstitious by the time he reached adulthood, in fact, that in 1863 he ordered his wife to hold on until after midnight so that their first child Sergey could be born in the early hours of 28 June. He was also pleased to discover that the number twenty-eight was particularly significant in mathematics as the second 'perfect' number (it is also one of seven 'magic' numbers in physics). He would open books of poetry on the twenty-eighth page and wind his watch twenty-eight times. He even wove the number twenty-eight into his fiction: it is a symbolically important number in his last novel Resurrection, which concludes on chapter twenty-eight of its third part. Before making any decision, Tolstoy would toss a coin on to the parquet floor at Yasnaya Polyana, seeing a good or bad omen in whether it rolled over an odd or even number of the wooden squares.10 It was also no coincidence that Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for the last time near the end of his life on 28 October (he was eighty-two when he died). He probably inherited his superstitious nature from his grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna, but it is a surprising trait to discover in someone who prided himself on the rationality of his thought.
Tolstoy was also superstitious about objects, such as the old leather couch on which he was born. Made by one of old Prince Volkonsky's serfs, it was ritually taken from Nikolay Ilyich's study and carried upstairs to Maria Nikolayevna's bedroom in the corner of the house for the birth of each of their five children. Eleven of Tolstoy's own children were born on it, not to mention two of his grandchildren (after five stillbirths, his eldest daughter Tanya gave birth to his favourite granddaughter Tanya on it in 1905).11Along with his desk, the couch was a permanent piece of furniture in each of the four rooms Tolstoy used as his study at Yasnaya Polyana at different times of his life, and it also makes an appearance in his novels. A very similar-sounding couch is brought out of Prince Andrey's study for the birth of his son in War and Peace, and in one of the drafts of Anna Karenina it is also mentioned as a Levin family heirloom with a similar function.
Tolstoy's earliest memories were of being tightly swaddled as a baby, and screaming at being unable to stretch out his arms. 'I feel the injustice and cruelty, not from people, as they pity me, but of fate, and of pity for myself,' he wrote in the autobiography he began when he was fifty. He was uncertain as to whether this memory — of the complexity and contradictoriness of his feelings rather than of his cries and suffering — was not, in fact, a composite of many impressions, but he was sure this was the 'first and strongest impression' of his life. Tolstoy also claimed (rather improbably) to have recalled his 'tiny body' being bathed in a wooden tub by his wet-nurse Avdotya Nikiforovna, a peasant engaged from the village. His next memories date from when he was four, and lying in a cot next to his younger sister Maria. By this time, his mother had already died. We can only regret that 'My Life', as it was provisionally called, petered out after the first few vivid pages of his earliest recollections. The same happened with the memoirs he began a quarter of a century later, which cover only his early childhood.12
Maria Nikolayevna died in 1830 not long after the birth of her only daughter, also christened Maria. She had been married for eight years, and had led a very quiet life at Yasnaya Polyana. As Tolstoy records in his memoirs, it was nevertheless a peaceful and happy time, her days taken up with raising her family, and her evenings devoted to reading aloud to her mother-in-law. The one member of her family she did not see so much of was her husband, who was embroiled in endless court cases concerning his late father's disastrous financial affairs, and often away. This was not easy for her, and she would sit for hours watching for his return in the gazebo in the corner of the estate. Her husband was obliged to write her letters reassuring her he had not forgotten her. 'My sweet friend,' he wrote to her in June 1824, 'you finish your last letter by asking me not to forget you; you are going mad: can I forget that which constitutes the most noble part of myself?' ('Ma douce amie, tu finis ta dernière lettre avec une recommendation de non pas t'oublier; tu deviens folle: puis-je oublier ce qui fait la partie la plus élevé de moi même...')13 Even when Nikolay Ilyich was at home, he was often out hunting, or according to one salacious claim, secretly pursuing other women.14 There was certainly some kind of romantic entanglement with a neighbour after his wife's death, but Nikolay Ilyich was by all accounts an attentive husband, and he became a conscientious father as a single parent, devoted to his five children.
Tolstoy remembered his father well, even though he too died young. His father was by far the most important person in his life during his early years, and as Tolstoy himself was later to acknowledge, he did not realise quite how much he had loved him until after his death. Tolstoy describes him being of average height, well built, with pleasant features and a ruddy complexion, but with eyes which were always sad. The Tolstoy children loved their father for the funny stories he told, and the enchanting pictures he drew for them. He was clearly a charismatic man in many ways, but what Tolstoy later claimed to have particularly loved and admired about his father was his independent spirit and clear sense of his own dignity.15
Nikolay Ilyich was quite a gentle man, and he was certainly more lenient with his serfs than the previous master of Yasnaya Polyana, Prince Volkonsky. He also rarely resorted to corporal punishment, unlike many sadistic Russian nobles at that time. Nikolay Ilyich was a keen reader: he added substantially to the library his youngest son would one day inherit by purchasing quantities of French classics and works about natural history. Tolstoy was later informed by his aunts that his father never bought new books until he had read the ones he already owned, but he doubted whether his father really had waded through all those dusty French tomes on the history of the Crusades.16 Nikolay Ilyich was also artistically gifted, and produced many fine watercolours of idyllic rural landscapes and pen-and-ink drawings, including a sensitively drawn sketch of a spirited Bashkirian horseman in native costume with bow and arrow.17
Tolstoy cherished his memories of his father cracking jokes at the dinner table, and of being allowed to come and sit beside him on the fabled leather sofa in his study while he smoked his pipe. There was one occasion when Nikolay Ilyich was particularly impressed with the pathos with which his youngest son Lev read aloud Pushkin's poem 'To the Sea', which he had learned by heart.18 The poem was written in 1824, when Pushkin was taking leave of the south after his period of exile, and by the time the young Tolstoy came to recite its lines a decade later, the fateful duel which killed the young poet in 1837 was only a few years away. The ocean was probably the one element which would never hold any attraction for Tolstoy. He lived in the heartland of Russia for nearly all his long life, far from any salt water, so may not later have identified with the sentiments in Pushkin's last stanza, in which the poet speaks of carrying into the 'woods and silent wildernesses' of Russia the sea's cliffs and coves, and the sound of its waves. But as if to compensate, Tolstoy was moved to shed an ocean of salty tears over his lifetime by music or stories of suffering. The emotional sensitivity his father noticed in him as a young boy rendered him very susceptible to crying: it was not for nothing that one of his nicknames as a child was Lyova—Ryova — 'Lyova the howler'.
As a small boy, Tolstoy liked to see his father elegantly dressed in frock-coat and close-fitting breeches in preparation for trips into town, but his most vivid memories of his father were connected with hunting. Nikolay Tolstoy loved hunting — both riding to hounds and shooting — and he had a particular affection for two servants, the brothers Petrusha and Matyusha, who usually accompanied him. Like many of his class, Nikolay Tolstoy considered hunting second only to warfare as an arena for showing courage and bravado, and so Tolstoy and his brothers were thus trained to hunt from a young age.19 Nikolay Ilyich thought it important for his sons to start learning to be real men as early as possible and they were each given ponies. In old age Tolstoy cherished memories of walking with his father through the long grass of the meadows with his beloved borzoi puppies running circles round them.20 Tolstoy himself would become a passionate huntsman (the hunting scenes in War and Peace are amongst the most lovingly written in the novel), and it took him a long time in later life to relinquish an activity which clearly contravened the moral and religious principles he embraced after his spiritual crisis. Tolstoy never abandoned horseriding, however, and his love of horses can be seen both in the exquisite detail of his description of Vronsky's horse Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina, and in 'Kholstomer' ('Strider'), the remarkable story he began in the 1860s and later revised, which is told from a horse's point of view.
Tolstoy's most vivid memories of his father may have been connected with hunting, but his fondest ones were of seeing him sitting next to his grandmother on the sofa, and helping her lay out the cards for patience while she occasionally took snuff from her gold snuffbox. His aunts would be in armchairs nearby, one of them reading aloud, while in another armchair his father's favourite borzoi Milka would be curled up asleep, or gazing at everyone with her beautiful black eyes (she appears in War and Peaceas herself). In his memoirs, Tolstoy recollects a particular evening when his father stopped whichever aunt was reading aloud and pointed to the mirror on the wall. Tikhon the manservant could be seen stealing furtively on tiptoes into his study and stealing tobacco from his leather pouch. Tolstoy's father found this very amusing.21
Nikolay Ilyich had a busy life, and he worked hard to restore the family fortunes. He certainly proved to have greater business acumen than his hapless father, and he left his children a legacy that amounted to far more than his late wife's dowry. In 1832 he owned 793 male and 800 female serfs, including 219 'souls' at Yasnaya Polyana and the surrounding villages. He was particularly pleased to be able to re-acquire Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye, one of his mother's estates that had previously been mortgaged. Tolstoy later inherited it when his brother Nikolay died. In 1837 Tolstoy's father was also able to buy Pirogovo, a large estate not far from Yasnaya Polyana, which came with 472 serfs, and was later inherited by Tolstoy's brother Sergey and his sister Maria.
When he was at home at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's father had his hands full with managing the estate, which he continued to run on the patriarchal lines established by Prince Volkonsky. Now that his family was so numerous, Nikolay Ilyich's most pressing task was to finish building the main family residence. A couple of thousand roubles thus went on building a second, rather more modestly appointed storey in oak over the elegant ground floor. At its centre were rooms with parquet flooring and high ceilings, while the side rooms had a mezzanine floor, which gave the house the appearance of having three storeys. When everything was complete, there was finally enough room for Nikolay Ilyich and his five children, his mother, the two aunts and his sister's ward Pashenka, the children's tutor Fyodor Ivanovich, and the last permanent additions to the household: Evdokiya (Dunechka) Temyasheva, the illegitimate, freckled daughter of a neighbouring landowner and his serf mistress, and her tall, elderly nanny Evpraksiya. Dunechka was five years old when she arrived at Yasnaya Polyana in 1833 (the same age as Tolstoy), and she was brought up with the rest of the family as part of the complex property dealings over the Pirogovo estate. Tolstoy later described Dunechka as a nice, straightforward, not very bright girl who was a big cry-baby, but she got on very well with the rest of the family.22
In his early childhood, Tolstoy was never alone. Among the grown-ups living at Yasnaya Polyana, his grandmother and the two aunts were important figures in his early life. Tolstoy's babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna had lived a life of luxury and was not inclined to give it up, despite the family's straitened circumstances. After being spoiled first by her father, then her husband and finally her son, she became rather tyrannical and capricious in her old age. Since everyone in the household went out of their way to please her in deference to her senior position, she made the most of being able to torment her maid, Agafya Mikhailovna, who put up with it as she was proud to be called a 'lady-in-waiting'. Agafya Mikhailovna remained a beloved member of Tolstoy's household when his own children were growing up, and he notes with amusement in his memoirs that his grandmother's ways must have rubbed off on her, as she later became just as demanding and capricious herself.
Tolstoy remembered his grandmother well. She had never particularly warmed to Maria Nikolayevna, whom she considered unworthy of the son she idolised, but she was very fond of their children, and found them very amusing. Tolstoy retained only a few memories of his grandmother dating from his earliest childhood, but they were vivid ones. First of all he remembered the enormous soap bubbles she produced when washing in the morning. He and his siblings found them so captivating they were sometimes brought into their grandmother's room just to watch her perform her ablutions. A picture of her white blouse, white skirt, elderly white arms and white shining face imprinted itself forever in Tolstoy's memory. He himself also acquired the nickname of 'Levka the bubble' as he was so rotund as a little boy.
Tolstoy also remembered a magical excursion on a hot day, when the family went into the woods to collect hazelnuts. His grandmother was transported in a yellow cabriolet pulled not by horses, but by his father's servants Petrusha and Matyusha, who bent down the branches for her so she could gather the nuts.23 That yellow carriage with the tall springs was also later used for summer outings to the little wooden house with shutters built by Sergey Volkonsky in Grumant, where there was a picturesque view of the River Voronka winding its way through the meadows to one side, and forests on the other. Nearby was a grove with a spring, which was the source of the fresh water used by the Tolstoy family; great quantities of it would be taken over to Yasnaya Polyana every day. There was also a deep pond full of tench, bream, carp, perch and sterlet, where the boys and their tutor could fish. Babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna, who had no great desire to be entertained by Matryona the cattlewoman in her shabby dress, did not join the children on these trips. But the children loved their afternoons with Matryona, her daughter and the peasant children, when they would be treated to chunks of black bread, and milk that had come straight from the cows. They liked being surrounded by cattle and hens, and the assortment of village dogs which congregated round Bertha, their tutor's setter.24
Tolstoy's strongest memories of his grandmother were connected with the treat of spending the night in her bedroom with Lev Stepanych, her blind storyteller. In pre-emancipation Russia it was quite common for serfs to become professional storytellers, who could be bought and sold at will by the nobility like pieces of furniture. Lev Stepanych had been purchased for Pelageya Nikolayevna by her late husband, and so he was brought along to Yasnaya Polyana along with the rest of her retinue. He was totally blind, so he had developed an exceptional memory, and was able to recall any story that had been read to him a couple of times word for word.
Tolstoy recalled that Lev Stepanych lived somewhere in the main house, but only appeared in the evening, when he would go upstairs to his grandmother's bedroom in preparation for the evening's storytelling. He would sit in his long blue frock-coat with puffy sleeves on a low windowsill there, and some supper would be brought to him while he waited for Pelageya Nikolayevna to retire. Since he was blind, she undressed in front of him without qualms, and then she and whichever grandchild was with her would climb into bed to get comfortable for that night's story. Tolstoy vividly recalled the moment when the candle was extinguished in his grandmother's bedroom, leaving the flickering light of the small lamp burning beneath the icons in the corner. He would see the dim profile of his grandmother tucked up in bed on a mound of pillows, again a vision all in white, this time with a nightcap on her head. At her command, Lev Stepanych's quiet, steady voice would then launch into a captivating tale — Tolstoy particularly remembered him telling one of Scheherazade's stories from The Arabian Nights. The story went over the young Lev's head, but he was transfixed by the sight of the shadow of his grandmother's profile quivering on the wall.25
Tolstoy's aunt Aline could not have been more different from her mother Pelageya Nikolayevna, who continued to behave like the grande dame she had once been well into her dotage. Refined and graceful, with dreamy blue eyes and a fair complexion, Aline was fond of reading and she played the harp.26 She scored a great success in Petersburg high society when she came out, and at the age of nineteen, in 1814, she was married off to Karl von Osten-Sacken, son of the Saxon ambassador to Russia, in what was thought to be a brilliant match. The young couple repaired to the family's Baltic estate, but within a year of the wedding Aline's husband was showing signs of serious mental illness. Tolstoy tells a gripping story in his memoirs of one incident when the deranged Count von Osten-Sacken shot at his pregnant wife at point-blank range before being permanently committed to an asylum.
Aline recovered (many years later she showed her nephew the scar left by the bullet), but the traumatic experience marked her. She moved back to St Petersburg, but gave birth to a still-born baby. Fearing the effect this would have on her, her family arranged to have her own child replaced with the newly born daughter of a servant they knew about, who was the wife of a court chef. This was Pashenka — Pelageya Ivanovna Nastasina, whom Aunt Aline brought up as her own child. Tolstoy reproduces this story in Part Two of Anna Karenina: Kitty makes friends at the German spa with a Russian girl Varenka, whose background is remarkably similar. Pashenka was about ten years older than Tolstoy, and sickly (she later died of tuberculosis). Neither Tolstoy, who described her as 'pale, quiet and meek', nor his siblings seem to have felt she was really their cousin, but she appears in the list he compiled in his memoirs of people he particularly loved in his childhood.
Aline was thirty-three when Tolstoy was born, and by this time she had become exceptionally pious. If it came naturally to Tolstoy later in his life to want to devote his money and energy to helping others, it may have been partly because he grew up with an aunt who practised the Christian principles she preached. She not only spent her time praying, observing the fasts, reading the lives of saints and visiting monasteries, but, like Princess Maria in War and Peace, sought out the company of monks, nuns, religious wanderers, beggars and holy fools. Some of these people came on visits to Yasnaya Polyana, but others virtually lived on the estate, including Marya Gerasimovna, a holy fool. She had spent her youth wandering through Russia in men's clothes under the guise of 'Ivan the Fool', a familiar character from Russian fairy tales. When Tolstoy's mother was about to give birth for the fifth time, she had asked Marya Gerasimovna to pray that she would finally have a girl. After his sister Masha was born, Marya Gerasimovna became her godmother, and a familiar figure in the Tolstoy household. The touching, naive faith of their gardener Akim led the Tolstoys to see him as almost another holy fool who lived at Yasnaya Polyana. The children would come across him praying in the main room of the summer house which stood between the two orangeries. Akim talked aloud to God, his 'healer', as if he was standing right there in front of him.27
Foreshadowing the path later taken by her nephew, Aline consistently gave her money away to the poor, maintained the simplest of diets and paid no attention to her external appearance, to the point of looking extremely unkempt; her nephew was clearly pained in his memoirs to have to comment on the rancid smell he remembered her exuding. At the same time he recalled her radiant expression and good-natured laughter, and his childhood memory of how uniformly kind she was to people, whatever their background, must have sunk deep into his consciousness. Aunt Aline may have had a far greater impact on her nephew's character than he realised.
Aline was an important person in Tolstoy's life, but he was not as close to her as he was to his aunt Toinette, who had been taken in as an orphaned child by Tolstoy's grandparents. Tolstoy supposed she must have been very attractive as a young girl with her mass of curly dark hair tied severely into a thick braid, agate-black eyes and a vivacious expression. He never stopped to ponder whether she was beautiful or not when he was a boy, but simply loved everything about her — her eyes, her smile, her slender hands and her warm personality. Toinette spoke better French than Russian, was a fine pianist and, like Aunt Aline, kind to everyone around her, including the servants. She may never have stopped to consider questions of social justice, according to Tolstoy, and she accepted the existence of serfdom as a fact of life, but he emphasises in his memoirs that she used her position of privilege only to serve people. She was also adamantly opposed to the family's serfs receiving corporal punishment of any kind. Tolstoy could not indeed remember her uttering even one harsh word in all the thirty years he knew her. She was a strong-willed and selfless person, he recollected in his memoirs, but her most important defining feature was love. Her whole life was love, Tolstoy wrote, but for just one person — his father. Despite wishing otherwise, Tolstoy was aware that she loved him and his siblings because of his father, and her affection for everyone else came also as a natural consequence of loving him.
Toinette was two years older than Nikolay Ilyich, with whom she had grown up, and she remained devoted to him, but like Sonya in War and Peace, she stepped aside so he could find a bride with a large dowry and thus have some hope of settling his father's enormous debts. Just as selflessly, Toinette became good friends with Maria Nikolayevna after his marriage. Six years after his wife died, perhaps prompted by fears for his health, Nikolay Ilyich proposed marriage to Toinette, but she declined, apparently not wanting to ruin what Tolstoy describes as her 'pure, poetic' relations with the family. She never spoke about this proposal, but she did accept Nikolay Ilyich's second request: to become a mother to his children and never leave them. Tolstoy declares in his memoirs that it was his aunt Toinette who taught him the 'spiritual pleasure' of love. She never imparted instruction on how to live, or on the reading of morally edifying literature, nor did she ever talk about religion or how to pray. It was not words but Toinette's 'whole being' which infected Tolstoy with love as a boy. Her moral and spiritual life was something which was completely internalised, and which manifested itself outwardly only in the supremely serene, unhurried and humble way in which she lived from day to day. This was something Tolstoy regarded as one of the greatest influences on his life.28
Tolstoy can be forgiven for not remembering everybody in his early childhood. With all the Tolstoys and their dependants, not to mention the large number of servants who also had to be accommodated, the Yasnaya Polyana house must have been quite a warren in the early 1830s. Not until well into his memoirs does Tolstoy remember another person who joined their family at some point in his early childhood — a girl called Lyubov Sergeyevna, another illegitimate child born out of wedlock who was taken in out of pity. Like Pashenka and Dunechka, she did not have an easy life, but the Tolstoys did their best for her, even attempting, but failing, to matchmake between her and Fyodor Ivanovich, the children's German tutor.29 Fyodor Ivanovich was another person who always seemed to be there in Tolstoy's childhood. He arrived in the summer of 1829 to take charge of Nikolay, who was then already six years old.
Foreign tutors were a fixture in Russian noble households, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, before serfdom was abolished. The offspring of aristocratic families did not, by and large, go to school, nor indeed was it feasible when so many of them grew up on remote country estates. Instead, tutors and governesses were imported, chiefly from France, Germany and England, and occupied a sometimes uneasy position in their new households between their employers and the domestic staff. Thus it was in the Tolstoy family. Fyodor Ivanovich was the Russian name the Tolstoys gave to Friedrich Rossel when he began his employment at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy does not say much about him in his memoirs, but points instead to the fact that his portrait of the German tutor Karl Ivanovich in Childhood was very true to life (and once even referred to Fyodor Ivanovich as Karl Ivanovich in one of his letters). He was a very kind and decent man, and beloved by the Tolstoy children, to whom he was devoted, but rather naïve, and not particularly well educated. The Tolstoy children all learned to speak good German — but with a distinct Saxon accent.30
The other important people in Tolstoy's early life, of course, were the servants — the nannies, butlers, valets, chefs, waiters, wine stewards and coachmen who were part of every Russian noble household during the years of serfdom. Some of them lived in the main family house; others in the grounds of the estate. As a baby, Lev was looked after first by old Annushka, who had been his brother Nikolay's nanny. He remembered her having very dark eyes and one tooth, and the Tolstoy children were both thrilled and scared when they were told she was 100 years old. For Tolstoy, old Anna Ivanovna and the venerable family housekeeper Praskovya Isayevna had a special aura, having worked under his grandfather, Nikolay Volkonsky. Praskovya Isayevna was later immortalised by Tolstoy in Childhood, and he later declared that the portrait of Natalya Savishna was true to life.31
The small, dark-skinned Tatyana Filippovna took over from Annushka as nanny to the Tolstoy children. She returned to Yasnaya Polyana after helping to raise Tolstoy's sister's daughters, and helped care for his first-born, Sergey. She later died in the house at Yasnaya Polyana, in the very room where Tolstoy sat writing his memoirs as an old man. He describes Tatyana Filippovna as a simple soul who was completely devoted to his family and was continually exploited by her own family: her good-for-nothing husband and son saw her as a source of ready money. Her brother Nikolay Filippovich was the coachman at Yasnaya Polyana, and he was also loved and respected by the Tolstoy children, who liked the fact that he smelled pleasantly of manure, and had a gentle, melodious voice.
Every Russian landowner had his favourites amongst their servants, and Tolstoy commented that this was particularly true of people like his father, who were passionate about hunting. The preferential treatment Nikolay Ilyich gave the two brothers Petrusha and Matyusha, who were invaluable in the field and doubled up by serving at table at home, meant they were not so popular with other servants, who resented the gifts and other privileges given to them. As was quite common in such cases, when they were given their freedom the brothers did not cope well with the sudden change from their former state of slavery, and never seemed to be satisfied with what they had been given. Neither of them ever married. As a young boy, Tolstoy simply admired them as strong, handsome men, always neatly turned out.
Along with Petrusha and Matyusha, the diminutive, grey-eyed Tikhon (the one who stole Nikolay Ilyich's tobacco on the quiet) also waited at the Tolstoy family table, but he was quite different. He had been a flautist in Nikolay Volkonsky's orchestra, and his second job was to sweep the reception rooms in the house every morning, after which he would sit in the front hall knitting socks. He was a born comic, and very popular with the Tolstoy children when he stood behind their father or grandmother at table and pulled funny faces. He would immediately become motionless again, plate held tight against his chest, as soon as an adult turned round. The mild-mannered, kind Vasily Trubetskoy, the wine steward with the crooked smile, was also remembered with affection, and he was very fond of all the children: he used to delight the Tolstoy boys when they were very small by putting them on a tray and carrying them round the pantry. Tolstoy tells us in his memoirs that as a six-year-old boy he was thunderstruck when he learned that Vasily had been appointed to manage an estate inherited by the family. He later claimed that the moment when Vasily came to give the Tolstoy children a customary kiss on the shoulder that Christmas, after learning of this promotion, was when he first experienced the anguish of confronting change.32
Christmas was the one time of year when the Tolstoy children traditionally mingled with the serfs on the estate. Extending for the whole twelve days until Epiphany, Yuletide in Russia was a particularly jolly time, when the rules of normal life were temporarily suspended, and mummers dressed in colourful and outlandish costumes would go on wild troika rides, or walk from house to house singing carols, and be treated in return to festive food and drink. It was also the custom for serfs to visit their owners. Every Christmas about thirty peasants belonging to the Tolstoy family would come up to the main house in fancy dress (there was always a bear and a goat), or dressed up as the opposite sex. The Tolstoy children also dressed up, giving themselves black moustaches with the aid of a burnt cork, and old Grigory, the former violinist in Nikolay Volkonsky's serf orchestra, would make his annual visit to Yasnaya Polyana to accompany the singing and dancing.33 Happy memories of these festivities, which were continued while Tolstoy's own children were growing up at Yasnaya Polyana, later inspired the enchanting scene in War and Peace when the young Rostovs, Natasha, Sonya and Nikolay, get dressed up one evening and travel by sleigh to visit their neighbours.
Foka Demidych, the family butler, had played second violin in the orchestra, but his performances in the 1830s, when Tolstoy was growing up, were restricted to announcing in his blue frock-coat every day at two o'clock that lunch was served, with as much ceremony as possible. The Tolstoys actually lived quite austerely compared with many noble families — apart from a pair of fine gilt-framed mirrors, some Voltaire armchairs and some mahogany tables, the house was decorated in a fairly spartan fashion, with furniture and table linen produced by their own carpenters and weavers. But in other respects the old patriarchal traditions of the Russian aristocracy were studiously maintained. Tolstoy comments proudly in his memoirs that his father did not have to undergo the indignity of having to become a civil servant in Nicholas I's government, and indeed he could not remember ever having even seen an official during his childhood and youth.34
The Tolstoys had various rituals which were faithfully observed. Each day began and ended with members of the family kissing each other's hands, and every Sunday they would troop off to the village church (where the children would try to copy their father, who bowed so low his right hand touched the ground).35 But it was lunch which was the most ritualised occasion in the Tolstoys' daily life. The entire family, including the children and their tutor, would gather in the drawing room to wait for Nikolay Ilyich to emerge from his study, and at the appointed time he would offer his hand to his mother to escort her into the dining room. Servants holding plates against their chests with their left hands would be stationed behind each family member's chair, while guests would be attended to by their own servants. At the end of each meal, Tolstoy's father would be handed his pipe and he would retire to his study; babushka would proceed to the drawing room and the children would go downstairs with Fyodor Ivanovich and draw pictures.
Tolstoy was the first to acknowledge how idyllic and privileged his early childhood was. Like so many Russian country estates at that time, Yasnaya Polyana was an almost self-sufficient kingdom, with its own population of serfs to till the fields, milk the cows, chop wood, weave carpets, cobble shoes, groom the horses, breed hounds for hunting, clear paths, complete the accounts, prepare meals, fetch water and do the laundry. It was also a whole world which Tolstoy never had to leave. Yasnaya Polyana provided a sheltered environment for him to grow up in, surrounded by his relatives and an extensive second family of household servants. It was also an elite school where he began his education with a private tutor, and an enormous playground whose woods, ponds, winding paths and streams promised the possibility of endless enticing adventures. Finally, it was a physically beautiful landscape of tree-lined avenues, elegant gardens and tranquil ponds. Tolstoy remained cocooned in this rural paradise for the first eight years of his life; indeed, the most significant journey he made during this period was downstairs, when he left the nursery at the age of five to join his elder brothers and come under the charge of his German tutor.
There are precious few third-person accounts ofTolstoy as a little boy, but his mischievousness stands out even in those few sources. In a letter Aline wrote to Toinette when he was around six, for example, she made a point of saying that it was some time since 'little Lev' had been dismissed from the dinner table, suggesting this had hitherto been a regular occurrence. Tolstoy's 'originality' was also noticed from an early age: his relatives remembered their amusement when the young boy took it into his head one day to come into the drawing room, turn round and bow to everybody present with his backside, throwing his head back, instead of inclining it, and clicking his heels.36
When he came to write his memoirs near the end of his life, Tolstoy refused to recount all his happy childhood memories, both because they were 'endless' and also because he feared it would be impossible to convey adequately to others the memories he cherished which were so important to him.37 He could recall very few specific events from his early childhood beyond his father coming and going, and the riveting stories he told about the adventures encountered on his hunting expeditions. He remembered only three occasions when something really made an impression on him, but two of these impressions are intriguing. One was when his mother's cousin, one of the Prince Volkonskys, a hussar, came to visit when he was very small and sat him on his knee. In his memoirs Tolstoy writes that the experience of feeling constricted compelled him to try to break loose while the young officer talked over his head to the other adults. This resulted in the hussar holding the young Lev even tighter. The feeling of captivity, of not being free, he writes in his memoirs, so incensed him that he started howling and trying to escape.38 Tolstoy would spend his life asserting his independence and resisting people's attempts to make him conform.
The other notable impression, made by another relative who visited Yasnaya Polyana, 'the famous American', Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, his uncle-once-removed, was far more positive, and is connected to what Tolstoy defined as the cardinal family trait:dikost. This is a word with many meanings, as so often encountered in the Russian language. Dikost literally means 'wildness', but it can also convey unsociableness or shyness. In other contexts it can mean weirdness, eccentricity, or absurdity. Tolstoy liked further to define dikost, when applying this word to members of his family, as the quality of possessing passion and daring. It was not a noun with negative connotations in his book. For him it denoted originality and independence of thought, as well as the propensity to do the opposite of everyone else. Tolstoy himself certainly went against the grain in almost everything he did as an adult, and even used dikost in this vein to describe the radical ideas he wished to apply to education when launching his pedagogical journal in 1862.39 Tolstoy perceived dikost not only in many of his illustrious ancestors, but also in some of his contemporary relatives — even his very prim and proper distant relative, who was a spirited but nevertheless very poised lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. 'You've got the Tolstoyan dikost that we all have,' he wrote to Alexandra Andreyevna in 1865. 'It was not for nothing that Fyodor Ivanovich got himself tattooed.' 40 Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy was indeed the wildest Tolstoy of them all: while visiting a Polynesian island in the South Pacific as a young man, he decided to emulate the natives by having his body completely covered in tattoos. Alexandra Andreyevna in turn called her younger relative Lev Nikolayevich 'the roaring lion'41 (the wordLev in Russian meaning both Leo and lion).
Tolstoy also invested one of his most autobiographical characters with dikost. 'All you Levins are diky, says the sophisticated bon viveur Stiva Oblonsky to his socially awkward but ardent, truth-seeking friend Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina; 'you always do what no one else does.'42 This is precisely how Tolstoy was perceived by his contemporaries. In 1868 Eugene Schuyler, the newly appointed American consul to Moscow, was discouraged but not deterred from meeting Tolstoy by a society hostess who characterised Tolstoy as 'very shy and very wild'.43 If it was from his early ancestor Count Pyotr Andreyevich that Tolstoy inherited his capacity for erudition, it was probably from Fyodor Ivanovich, the 'wild' Tolstoy who got himself tattooed all over, that he inherited his independent spirit and physical strength. Young Lev Tolstoy hardly needed fairy tales when there was a relative in his own family whose life story read like an adventure novel — and his own son Sergey was later so captivated that he published a short biography of Fyodor Tolstoy in 1926.44
Fyodor Tolstoy (1782–1846) earned a reputation for wildness at a young age, fighting his first duel at the age of seventeen soon after being commissioned as an officer in the elite Preobrazhensky Guards regiment in St Petersburg. In 1803, four years later, he escaped the confines of military life by securing, against all odds, a berth on Adam von Krusenstern's three-masted British-built sloop Nadezhda. The mission was to complete the first Russian round-the-world expedition, along with a sister ship, the Neva.45After stops in Copenhagen, Falmouth and the Canary Islands, the Nadezhda set sail for Cape Horn, and thence for the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, where Fyodor Tolstoy acquired his famous tattoos. By this time, Captain Krusenstern was heartily fed up with the young officer. Unlike the naturalist, the astronomer, the artist and the doctor on board, Fyodor Ivanovich had nothing much to do, and so amused himself by provoking arguments with the crew, just for the sheer hell of it, and carrying out outrageous pranks, such as apparently letting loose an orang-utan (or was it a monkey?) in the captain's cabin. He also got the ship's priest paralytically drunk one day and then glued his beard to the deck with sealing wax. When the Nadezhda arrived at the Kamchatka peninsula on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire, before sailing on to Japan, Captain Krusenstern ordered Tolstoy to leave the ship.
Fyodor Tolstoy's life became so shrouded in legend and prurient gossip that it is difficult to establish the veracity of the many stories which circulated about him, or even the facts of his departure from the Nadezhda. One story maintained that he had been abandoned on the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific between Kamchatka and Alaska, together with a monkey (or was it an orang-utan?), which he was later forced to eat out of hunger. The monograph of Fyodor Ivanovich which Tolstoy's son Sergey published in 1926 refutes this. Sergey Tolstoy notes that he once had his hair pulled at the age of nine by a monkey when visiting Fyodor Tolstoy's ageing daughter in Moscow in 1872: she always had a monkey as a pet in memory of the original one her father had kept. In his book, Sergey Tolstoy concludes that Fyodor Ivanovich was certainly put ashore, and definitely spent some time with native tribes on Sitka Island in southern Alaska, which was then part of the colony called 'Russian America'. This is how Fyodor Ivanovich came to acquire his nickname of 'Tolstoy the American'.46
In August 1805, two years after leaving St Petersburg, Fyodor Tolstoy arrived back in the Russian capital, having made his way back across Siberia overland. He was promptly arrested and sent to serve for three years in a remote fortress in current-day Savonlinna, 150 miles north of St Petersburg. By risking his life in the Finnish War, against Sweden (Finland was formally annexed by Russia in 1809), Tolstoy was allowed to rejoin the Preobrazhensky Guards, but his nefarious exploits led to more duels and in 1811 he was dismissed from the army. Nevertheless, his swashbuckling spirit led him to volunteer when Napoleon invaded Russia and his bravery during the Battle of Borodino, during which he was wounded, resulted in him being restored to the ranks and decorated. It is not surprising that Fyodor Ivanovich came to Tolstoy's mind when he was writing War and Peace. His relative provided him with the initial inspiration for the character of the desperate, fast-living Dolokhov, who shares his name and patronymic, as well his passion for cards.
In keeping with Tolstoyan dikost, Fyodor Ivanovich continued to be full of surprises after finally retiring to Moscow post-1812. He gave up fighting duels and gambling, and calmed down. In 1821 he married a gypsy singer (after which he was promptly ostracised by many in Moscow society) and had twelve children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. Tolstoy got to know Fyodor's widow Avdotya and daughter Praskovya in Moscow in the 1840s and 1850s. Fyodor Tolstoy became very pious as he got older, and those who asked to see his tattoos would see him first remove the large icon of St Spiridon, the patron saint of the Tolstoy family, which he wore round his neck, before showing off the brightly coloured bird in the middle of his chest, surrounded by red and blue patterns, and serpents on his arms.
Fyodor Ivanovich had led a colourful life, and it clearly meant a great deal to Tolstoy to have met his notorious ancestor when he was a child. In his memoirs he declares there is much he would have liked to say about this 'extraordinary, lawless, and attractive man', whose handsome, tanned face with thick sideburns extending to the corners of his mouth clearly left an unusually vivid impression on him as a young boy.47 Fyodor Ivanovich had mellowed by the time he visited Yasnaya Polyana in the early 1830s, when he was in his fifties, but he was still eccentric, producing two embroidered lawn handkerchiefs which he claimed would magnetically cure the toothache suffered by Tolstoy's elder brother Sergey.
When Fyodor Ivanovich visited Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was around seven years old. His earliest extant manuscript dates from around this time. The two notebook pages preserved in his archive were his contribution to a journal co-produced with his brothers:
Children's Amusements
Section One
Natural History
Written by C[ount]. L[ev]. N. To[lstoy]: 1835
1. The Eagle
The eagle is king of the birds. They say that a boy started to tease him once, and he grew angry with him and pecked him to death.
2. The Falcon
The falcon is a very useful bird, it catches gazelles. The gazelle is an animal which runs very fast, so dogs cannot catch it; the falcon will swoop down and kill it.
3. The Owl
The owl is a very strong bird, and it cannot see in sunlight. An eagle owl is also an owl. The eagle owl only differs through its tufts.
4. The Parrot
The parrot is a very beautiful bird, its beak hangs down or is like a hook, and it is taught to speak.
5. The Peacock
The peacock is also beautiful, it has blue patches, and its tail is bigger than it is itself.
6. The Humming Bird
The humming bird is a very small little bird, it has a golden beak, it can be white.
7. The Rooster
The rooster is a beautiful bird, its brightly coloured tail hangs downwards, its throat is red, blue and all colours, and its wattle is red. When the Indian rooster sings, it lowers its tail and its throat, which is red, black and all colours, puffs up. The Indian rooster has a different tail to the rooster, the Indian rooster has a tail which is loose.
We know very little else about 'Children's Amusements', and equally little about other literary ventures that the Tolstoy brothers engaged in during the 1830s. When he wrote his memoirs, Tolstoy had only a few distinct early childhood memories of his brothers, who were his first playmates, but there was one event which he remembered his whole life, and which was one of the most important and most cherished of all his memories. When he was about five years old, his beloved eldest brother Nikolay, then about eleven, announced that the secret to human happiness was written on a little green stick which was buried in the woods a short walk from their house. When the secret was revealed, he told his brothers, people would not only be happy, but they would also cease to be ill, and would no longer be angry with each other. At that point everybody would become 'ant brothers' (muraveinye bratya). Tolstoy explains in his memoirs that Nikolay must have read something about the Moravian Brethren (the moravskie bratya).
As the eldest, Nikolay Tolstoy was revered by his brothers, who all used the polite vy form of address with him (rather than ty). Young Lev admired Nikolay most of all, and describes him in his memoirs as a 'remarkable boy with a keen artistic sensitivity, a vibrant imagination, and a highly developed moral sense, who was kind and good-natured without ever being smug'. The Tolstoy boys were enthralled by the elaborate games and rituals thought up by Nikolay, who one day promised to take them to the mythical 'Fan-faronov mountain' if they carried out to the letter the conditions he set. These included standing in the corner and trying not to think about the white bear, and avoiding seeing a hare for a whole year. In their childhood, the Tolstoy brothers also played at being 'ant brothers' by huddling together in a den created from two chairs, a couple of boxes and some shawls. In his adulthood, Tolstoy would continue to believe fervently in the possibility of the ant brothers' ideal, but writ large, so as to encompass the whole of humanity. In memory of his brother Nikolay, and his aspirations to love and kindness, which he had sought to emulate, Tolstoy requested towards the end of his life to be buried at the spot where the little green stick was supposedly hidden, and this was indeed where he would be laid to rest in November 1910.48
The religious impulse which inspired Tolstoy in the 1880s was strangely not so distant from that which gave rise to the Moravian Brethren. The Moravian Church, which continues to flourish today, dates back to the rebellion against Roman Catholicism mounted by Jan Hus in the late fourteenth century, more than 100 years before Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Hus and his other Czech-speaking followers were based in Bohemia and Moravia, whose Slav populations had been the first to be converted to Eastern Orthodoxy by the Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The 'Hussites' were keen to revive those traditions, as well as rejecting the contemporary practice of indulgences ministered by the Catholic Church, to which the local populations had been forcibly converted when they became subjects of the Austrian Empire. The idea of personal salvation based on the individual's relationship with God was and remains central to the doctrine of the Moravian Church, and Tolstoy would preach something similar many centuries later, when he rebelled against what he perceived as the Orthodox Church's dependence on ritual and superstition. The early Protestants of Bohemia and Moravia were inevitably persecuted during the Counter Reformation, and in the years which followed, their church went underground. Many of their number eventually emigrated to parts of Europe hospitable to Lutheranism, with whose doctrines they had much in common.
It is intriguing that Tolstoy also has something in common with the founder of the revived Moravian Church, the eccentric Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, whose commitment to serving the poor led him to allow a group of Brethren to form a community on his land in the 1720s. Zinzendorf ended up leaving his position with the Saxon royal court in Dresden, and turning his back on his title and aristocratic lifestyle to live a simple life and devote himself to serving God. It was he who brought unity to the new village established by the immigrants, which led to them adopting a 'Brotherly Agreement', and he was key to the Brothers one day experiencing a spiritual transformation which led them to love one another. Tolstoy, of course, never believed he was starting a new church and he also dispensed with all sacraments. But in his appeal to ecumenical ideas of fellowship, and in his preaching of the merits of a simple life of service, he aligned himself with the ideals of the Moravian Brotherhood. As a pioneer ant brother, he would, moreover, definitely have approved of their motto: 'In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, love'.