3. ORPHANHOOD

I congratulate you, my dear Lyova, and also your brothers and sister, I wish you good health and diligence in your studies, so that you never cause any unpleasantness for dear Auntie Tatyana Alexandrovna, who works so hard for us. Mitya and Lyova, we went on a wonderful walk the other day, we all went to Sparrow Hills, and drank tea there. Since the weather is so good, I imagine you were in Grumant. I hope you have lots of fun. I send love to my dear Masha...

Letter from Nikolay Tolstoy in Moscow to Lev, Dmitry and Masha Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, on the occasion of Lev's tenth birthday, August 1838¹

LOOKING BACK OVER HIS LIFE when he was in his seventies, Tolstoy described the 'innocent, joyful, poetic period' of his childhood as lasting until he was fourteen.² Only the first seven of those fourteen years were truly cloudless, however. In the second seven, Tolstoy lost his father, his grandmother and his aunt, was temporarily separated from his elder brothers, and moved three times. The last upheaval resulted in a relocation several hundred miles from home. In a very real sense, the most idyllic part of Tolstoy's childhood began its decline with the first of those relocations, when the reassuring bucolic surroundings of Yasnaya Polyana were exchanged for the intimidating new world of metropolitan Moscow. It is these years, and the ones immediately following, which are amongst the least documented in what is generally an over-documented life. With a few exceptions, Tolstoy's memoirs essentially come to a halt with the family's departure from Yasnaya Polyana, although his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth is also a wonderful source of atmospheric detail about his early years, since it is clearly rooted in his own experience, despite it being a work of fiction.

Tolstoy's father moved his family to Moscow in January 1837 for the sake of the elder boys' education. Lev was only eight years old, but his eldest brother Nikolay was now fourteen, and already preparing for his university entrance. The relocation was a major undertaking, since the family was numerous, comprising the five Tolstoy children, two wards, two aunts, Nikolay Ilyich and his mother, and was accompanied by a full complement of thirty servants.³ The journey north lasted two days, and involved a caravan of seven carriages, plus a special closed sleigh for grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna. To make her feel safe, she was chaperoned by two of the family's manservants, who were forced to endure freezing temperatures and stand on the runners all the way.⁴The children took it in turns to sit with their father, and when they finally drove into Moscow, it was Lev who was lucky enough to be sitting next to him as he proudly pointed out the churches and prominent buildings they could see through the carriage windows.⁵

Arriving from the south, the Tolstoys would have driven through the colourful merchants' quarter, the Zamoskvorechie ('Beyond the Moscow river') and so would have first seen a profusion of onion-domed churches. The merchants were traditionally the most pious section of the Russian population, and the Zamoskvorechie had the greatest concentration of churches in Moscow, which was already a city renowned for its large number of churches. Nikolay Ilyich had rented a handsome house with a mezzanine set back from the street in a spacious courtyard, and after driving through the Zamoskvorechie, the Tolstoy family caravan would have turned west and arrived in a quiet residential area near to the Moscow river. It was to this part of Moscow that Tolstoy returned when his own family moved to the city in the 1880s.

In old age, Tolstoy had only dim memories of these first few months in the old capital. The city had by now fully recovered from the traumatic events of 1812, following an intense period of reconstruction, and the new urban surroundings would have seemed overwhelming for a boy used to a tranquil rural environment; he now found himself in the midst of buildings and strangers, and no longer the centre of attention. Nikolay was busy preparing for the university, and the Tolstoy children rarely saw their father, who had engaged as many as twelve tutors (including a dancing teacher) to keep his children busy, at an imposing annual cost of 83,000 roubles.⁶ Meanwhile Nikolay Ilyich had become embroiled in a lawsuit over his purchase of the estate of Pirogovo from Alexander Temyashev, the man who had begged him to bring up his illegitimate daughter Dunechka. Temyashev was stricken with paralysis shortly after the contract was signed, and his relatives wanted the deeds declared null and void. As far as Tolstoy's father was concerned, however, he was now its legitimate owner. Nikolay Ilyich's health had been frail ever since his gruelling time in the army during and after the Napoleonic invasion. The stress of having to pick up the pieces and take responsibility after his father's bankruptcy, dismissal from the governorship of Kazan and untimely death had not helped. Tolstoy's father also had a tendency to drink too much. In 1836 he had written to a friend to tell him he was on a strict diet and taking medicines after experiencing the shock of coughing up a lot of blood.⁷

2. The house in Plyushchikha Street, Moscow, to which Nikolay Ilych Tolstoy brought his mother, sister andfive children in 1837

In June, a few months after arriving in Moscow, Nikolay Ilyich was obliged to go urgently to Tula to try to deal with the crisis which had blown up over his purchase of Pirogovo. Taking only his faithful servants Petrusha and Matyusha, he covered the distance in half the time it had taken his family to travel to Moscow earlier that year. That also had a deleterious effect on his health.⁸ The following evening, shortly before his forty-third birthday, he suffered a massive lung haemorrhage and stroke while walking down the street in Tula, and died that same day. Rumours flew about that he had been poisoned by his servants, since all his money appeared to have been stolen, but Tolstoy was later not inclined to believe this story.⁹

Nikolay Ilyich's unexpected death was understandably a huge shock to his family. His sister Aline and his eldest son Nikolay travelled down from Moscow, and they buried him next to his wife Maria Nikolayevna in the village cemetery next to Yasnaya Polyana. For young Lev, his father's death was the most significant event of his childhood, and for a long time he kept expecting to see him one day on the streets of Moscow.¹⁰ Babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna, who had doted on her son Nikolay, never really recovered, and the loss was also acutely felt by his sister Aline, and perhaps above all by his distant cousin Toinette, for whom he had been the centre of her world.

It was Aline who now became guardian to the five Tolstoy children, with assistance from one of her late brother's friends, Sergey Yazykov, who had an estate in Tula province. Sergey Yazykov was also Lev's godfather, but his involvement was fairly minimal from the start, and even that decreased over time. As well as assuming responsibility for the children's education, Aline now had to occupy herself with the crude practicalities of selling cattle and organising harvests, since she was now in charge of the considerable income that came from the five disparate properties the Tolstoy children had inherited. Each estate came with a farm, and each farm had complicated accounts that needed to be carefully checked, obliging Aline to deal with uncouth stewards and bookkeepers who could often be truculent and dishonest. Aline was also now responsible for the welfare of the hundreds of serfs who belonged to the Tolstoy family. It was their toil, after all, which enabled the Tolstoys to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. All in all, it was a job for which someone so naive and otherworldly was ill-qualified, to say the least, as Aline's chief interests, after all, were spiritual, not material. Nikolay Ilyich had done some intricate and crafty manoeuvring in order to enable his family to live in the manner to which it had become accustomed in Moscow as well as in the country, but he left his financial affairs in a perilous state at the time of his death. All Aline could see were debts.¹¹ And then there was the still-unresolved lawsuit, which would drag on for several more years before finally being resolved in the Tolstoys' favour.

The Tolstoy children remained in Moscow throughout the hot summer months following their father's death, when otherwise they would probably have returned to Yasnaya Polyana. Aline was fortunate to be assisted by Aunt Toinette in caring for them. It was Toinette, for example, who took the children to the Bolshoi Theatre for the first time later that autumn. They sat in a box, and as an old man Tolstoy remembered that he had not immediately realised that he should not be looking straight across to the boxes opposite but sideways, down to the stage.¹² Even the children's redoubtable grandmother now took a hand in their upbringing. Prospère Saint-Thomas had been engaged as French tutor for the elder boys, and three days after her son's death Pelageya Nikolayevna decided to invite the fair-haired Frenchman from Grenoble to become resident governor to her grandchildren, replacing their kindly but not terribly competent German tutor Fyodor Ivanovich, who was consequently demoted. Being impressed by all things French, Pelageya Nikolayevna imagined Saint-Thomas would become the male authority figure that the children needed. The small, wiry Frenchman was certainly dynamic, but Tolstoy bridled at his self-importance and vanity, and he was also not impressed by his grandiloquent rhetorical flourishes.¹³ Saint-Thomas was also a harsh disciplinarian who forced his pupils to beg forgiveness for misdemeanours on their knees. Worst of all was the moment when he locked the young Lev up and threatened to punish him with the rod. In terms of its significance, the incident was certainly not on a par with his father's death, but it nevertheless left a very deep impression on Tolstoy - so much so that some sixty years later he recalled in his diary the humiliation and misery of overhearing his family's laughter and merriment while he was locked up 'in prison'. In his memoirs, he went so far as to date his lifelong horror of violence back to this ordeal.¹⁴ It is telling that Tolstoy should have dwelled on this incident. In 1908 Lenin would famously characterise the 'tearing off of masks' as a hallmark of Tolstoy's fiction and it seems that, at nine years old, Tolstoy was already capable of seeing through his French tutor's pretentious veneer. Even though it was precisely at this point that he began to enjoy studying, his already obstinate and headstrong nature made him resent moreover submitting to the authority of a person he did not respect.¹⁵ Later on, he would resent submitting to any authority.

The friction in Tolstoy's relationship with Saint-Thomas may have been caused by an awareness at some level that he possessed a superior intellect, but his mental acuity was not always on show, and certainly not on the day he tried to fly. It was more probably Tolstoyan dikost which impelled him to go up to the classroom on the mezzanine floor one day and take a running jump out of the window. He claimed afterwards that he had wanted to do something unusual and surprise everybody. Since everybody was at table, however, wondering where he was, they remained oblivious — until the mystery of young Lev's absence was solved by the cook, who had seen him hurtling towards the ground through the kitchen window. As it turned out, Tolstoy was blessed with a strong constitution. He lost consciousness briefly and suffered some concussion, but was fully restored to health after sleeping solidly for eighteen hours.¹⁶

Just before the first anniversary of Nikolay Ilyich's death in May 1838, babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna died after a long and painful illness. She was seventy-six. This death Tolstoy experienced fully, as he had to endure being taken with his siblings to kiss the lifeless white hand that lay on top of the mound of white linen on their grandmother's high bed, and say goodbye to her before she breathed her last. He also had to confront the sight of her stern, hook-nosed face in the open coffin lying on the table before she was taken off to be buried, and put on a newly sewn black mourning jacket.¹⁷ Unable to contemplate any change to her formerly grand aristocratic life-style, Grandmother Pelageya had insisted on maintaining the family's highly ritualised and formal dining habits after her son's death, but now everything fell apart. Even the impractical Aunt Aline could see that the sums did not add up. After subtracting the money needed to pay various wages, bribes and dues, the income from the family's five estates barely covered the rental of their Moscow house and the salaries of all the tutors who had been engaged, let alone any of their other expenses.

Some drastic decisions had to be taken, which resulted in the family being split up, with Aline remaining in Moscow with Saint-Thomas, her ward Pashenka and the two eldest boys. They now moved to a smaller and much cheaper flat, but were glad to leave behind the big house 'which had seen so many tears'. The two youngest boys, their sister Masha and Dunechka accompanied Aunt Toinette and Fyodor Ivanovich back to Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸

One casualty of the downsizing was the Tolstoys' faithful coachman Mitka Kopylov, whom the family could no longer afford to keep on. His strength and agility, combined with his diminutive size, had also made him an irreplaceable and valued postilion, and the rewards for his good service and his pride in his work were reflected in the silk shirts and velvet coats he wore. There were plenty of Moscow merchants ready to give such a smartly turned-out coachman a wage, but when Mitka's brother was conscripted into the army due to the quota system that was in operation, he was forced to go back to work as a labourer at Yasnaya Polyana. Conscription always represented a major loss for peasant families, even after the term of service was reduced to twenty years, as soldiers in the infantry were not able to return home while serving. It was particularly difficult in this case. Mitka's elderly father now needed his other son to come back and work in the fields, and within a few months the debonair new Muscovite had gone back to being a drably dressed peasant in bast shoes. As a serf, he had no choice, and Tolstoy later explained that Mitka's quiet acceptance of his lot, and the uncomplaining way he surrendered a job he loved for heavy agricultural work, were highly influential on his nascent feelings of affection and respect for the Russian peasantry.¹⁹

Although he had partly enjoyed the experience of living in Moscow, and the chance to make new friends, Tolstoy must have been relieved to escape from his tutor and go back home to Yasnaya Polyana after his grandmother's death. He and Dmitry were now able to go and visit the new estate at Pirogovo, which had a fine stud farm, and they each received their own pony. It would be two years before the brothers were all reunited at Yasnaya Polyana, but in the meantime they started writing to each other. At this stage their correspondence was not terribly exciting. A week after Dmitry and Lev left Moscow, Sergey wrote to tell them that all was well in their new home, and that the cactus was about to start flowering. Lev wrote back to tell Sergey and Nikolay about his new pony. Sometimes Nikolay wrote, sometimes the letters were in French, and sometimes the elder brothers deigned to include their sister Masha as an addressee.²⁰ Occasionally Dunechka also got a mention in their letters, but she left the family in March 1839 to go to a boarding school in Moscow, and Tolstoy now became closer to Masha for the first time as a result.²¹

In August 1839 the cadet branch of the family enjoyed a leisurely journey back to Moscow for a visit. Since they were travelling in the summer months, and since Tolstoy was now eleven, and curious about everything, it was a great adventure for him. Most exciting of all, however, was the prospect of seeing the Tsar lay the cornerstone of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This was the Cathedral Alexander I had pledged to build back in 1812 when Napoleon retreated from Moscow, 'to preserve the eternal memory of that unprecedented zeal, loyalty for the Faith and the Fatherland with which the Russian people exalted itself in these difficult days, and to mark Our gratitude to God's Providence, by saving Russia from the ruin threatening her'.²² Five years after Napoleon had been driven from Moscow, the cornerstone had been laid in 1817 at a magnificent ceremony attended by 400 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy, 50,000 guards officers, the Tsar and his family and hundreds of thousands of their loyal subjects. But despite the injection of 16 million roubles from the state treasury, and the labour of some 20,000 serfs specially drafted in for the purpose, construction had not gone according to plan. Officially it came to a halt because the foundations were insufficiently secure. In reality, the money was embezzled, creating a huge scandal whose duration was long enough to provide inspiration for Gogol's classic play about Russian corruption, The Government Inspector, in 1836.²³

After becoming tsar in 1825, Nicholas moved the cathedral's location from the Sparrow Hills, the highest point in Moscow, to a site by the river nearer to the Kremlin. He also exchanged the original neoclassical blueprint for a new Russian-Byzantine design modelled on Justinian's Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople, which was much more in keeping with his tastes, not to mention his vision of the Russian Empire. Nicholas I's arrival in Moscow to lay the new cornerstone of the cathedral in September 1839 was a national event, and the Tolstoys were there to witness it. As friends of Alexey Milyutin, who headed the Commission for the Construction of the Cathedral, they were able to watch the ceremony from the windows of his house, which looked out right on to the site. They thus had a thrilling bird's-eye view not only of the Tsar, but of the elite Preobrazhensky Guards in their formal dress uniforms, who had travelled specially from St Petersburg along with Nicholas I to take part in the military parades.²⁴ After a special liturgy in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, the Tsar led a procession on foot to the building site, followed by veterans of 1812, church dignitaries, twenty infantry battalions and six cavalry troops, accompanied by constant cannon fire and the ringing of the bells in all of Moscow's churches. Thus was the great victory over Napoleon celebrated again.²⁵

A quarter of a century later, the construction of the enormous cathedral's exterior would be complete, and Tolstoy would be hard at work writing the vast novel which would commemorate the events of 1812, his patriotic feelings still intact. But he had no desire to be anywhere near the cathedral when it was finally consecrated amidst great pomp in May 1883, after the completion of its sumptuous interior decoration. Indeed, he was hundreds of miles away drinking fermented mare's milk (koumiss) on his farm in the steppe, having by this time renounced his Orthodox faith, his fiction and any lingering patriotic feelings. He had, however, been casting his mind back to that visit to Moscow in 1839 at that time, for he was eleven years old when he consciously began to question his faith. On the first page of his Confession, which he tried to publish in 1882, he describes how excited he and his brothers had been when Alexey Milyutin's son Vladimir came to see them one day that autumn and told them of his discovery that there was no God.²⁶ Along with the pain of being locked up by his French tutor, this event was also etched deeply into Tolstoy's memory.

Other memories from this period of Tolstoy's childhood are few and far between, but the isolated incidents recalled in his memoirs for that reason resonate all the more. It was only after his father's death, for example, that the young Tolstoy was brought face to face with the corporal punishment that was occasionally practised at Yasnaya Polyana, where the regime was generally far more humane than on other noble estates. One day, as they returned with their tutor from a walk and were walking past the threshing barn, the children encountered Andrey Ilyin, the overweight steward of the estate, followed by the family's assistant coachman Kuzma, whose mournful expression astonished them. Upon enquiring where they were going, Andrey calmly replied that he was taking Kuzma to the threshing barn to flog him. 'I cannot describe the terrible feeling these words and the sight of the kind and dejected Kuzma produced in me,' Tolstoy wrote in his memoirs, pointing out that Kuzma by this time was a married man, and no longer young. When that evening he told Aunt Toinette about it, she reproached the children angrily for not stopping Andrey, although they clearly did not realise they had the power to intervene. Toinette loathed corporal punishment, and she not only would not countenance the Tolstoy children receiving it, but she did her best to prevent it being meted out to the serfs whenever she could.²⁷ Tolstoy would later also recall this incident in an incendiary article he wrote in 1895 entitled 'Shameful', in which he railed about peasants having to submit to humiliating corporal punishment for any small misdemeanour.²⁸

Tolstoy never forgot the time his French tutor threatened to thrash him, but the rancour he felt towards him evaporated, particularly when Saint-Thomas wrote him a congratulatory and encouraging letter about a touching poem of gratitude he had written on the occasion of his aunt Aline's name-day in January 1840, when all the Tolstoys gathered at Yasnaya Polyana. The family were so taken with it that Aunt Aline took a fair copy back to Moscow to show Saint-Thomas, who clearly was not so much of a martinet that he could not recognise signs of talent.²⁹ That summer, friendly relations were established on a firmer footing when Saint-Thomas visited Yasnaya Polyana for the first time, and went hunting with the Tolstoy boys. His verdict on Lev was that he was 'un petit Molière'.³⁰

Lev meanwhile continued to resist having to learn lessons by rote, whether from the seminarian engaged to teach the younger boys at Yasnaya Polyana, or from old Fyodor Ivanovich Rossel, who was dismissed for drunkenness in 1840.³¹ Adam Fyodorovich Meyer, the German who replaced him, proved to be even worse, and in the end Fyodor Ivanovich was allowed to return to Yasnaya Polyana, where he remained, living on as a pensioner until the middle of the 1840s. Tolstoy may not have been the most diligent pupil, and that situation did not change during his adolescence, but he clearly enjoyed reading, which did not involve submitting to any kind of coercive authority. Many years later, when he was in his sixties, Tolstoy revealed the books that had made the most impression on him as a small boy.³² First of all there were the books which made a 'great' impression on him: A Thousand and One Nights, some of whose tales he had heard from his grandmother's blind storyteller, and Pushkin's 1821 poem 'Napoleon', which sparked off an interest that would later produce spectacular literary results. Then there was Anton Pogorelsky's story 'The Black Hen or The Underground Residents', which made a 'very great' impression on Tolstoy, perhaps partly because when he was a very young boy he kept hens and chicks himself.³³

Written in 1829 for the author's twelve-year-old nephew Alyosha Tolstoy (a distant cousin who was later to become a distinguished writer himself),³⁴ it is about a young boy (also named Alyosha), who saves a favourite hen from being served up for dinner one day. The hen, it turns out, is also a minister in a secret underground kingdom of miniature people, whose king rewards Alyosha with a magic kernel of corn enabling him to come top of the class without studying. One day, however, things start to go wrong, and Alyosha loses his magic powers, only to rediscover the importance of hard work and humility. Along with fantasy, this classic story incorporates certain biographical details, and was the first work for and about children in Russian literature. Admittedly, Pogorelsky (1787-1836) was a minor writer, and this story was written for children; all the same, the common view that Tolstoy's first published work, his autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, was the first work in Russian literature to have a child as the central character is not quite accurate.³⁵ Tolstoy himself clearly never forgot 'The Black Hen', and later in his life he himself turned to writing simple stories for a popular audience, also combining a degree of fantasy with a moral. Since there was still very little children's literature available when he became an adult, particularly for peasant children, he also sought to fill this gap; the 629 works he produced during his lifetime comprise tales, fables, legends and sketches.

The works Tolstoy recorded in 1891 as having made an 'enormous' impression on him as a child were the biblical story of Joseph, Russian fairy tales, and the popular folk epics (byliny) about the semi-historical, legendary heroes (bogatyrs) of old Rus. Tolstoy mentions three names in particular: the Kievan boyar Dobrinya Nikitich, a diplomat and dragon slayer; the priest's son Alyosha Popovich, who uses cunning to outwit his enemies; and Ilya of Murom, the greatest hero of all, who is still the most powerful literary personification of the Russian people. Ilya of Murom is a peasant's son, who lies at home on the brick stove until he is thirty-three years old, apparently unable to move. After some wandering beggars give him strength, he then sets out on his horse to perform mighty feats, defeating whole armies single-handedly, and always drawing his super-human power from the Russian land. Ilya of Murom was a warrior who combined strength with meekness, patience and stamina, not wanting to kill, but passionate about defending his nation. The only bogatyr ever made into an Orthodox saint, and an ascetic who refuses to marry, Ilya of Murom has always also been a symbol of spiritual power.³⁶

The only Russian who ever came close to bearing comparison with the mighty Ilya of Murom was Tolstoy, who was just as devoted to his native land, and was similarly identified with it by Russians and foreigners alike ('when you read Tolstoy's works, it is impossible not to feel the Russian soul in them' is a familiar refrain).³⁷ Tolstoy was thirty-five when he found his feet, as it were, and began writing War and Peace, his own epic, one of the longest and greatest works of fiction ever written (which he never regarded as a novel in the conventional sense). He was renowned for his physical strength and stamina, spending long periods in the saddle and fighting with bravery while serving with the Russian army. He had enormous wealth and a huge family, and was later to give it all up to live humbly and work on behalf of the peasantry, fighting against injustices of every kind and becoming the most influential spiritual leader in Russia, even proclaiming chastity. He was frequently portrayed in cartoons as a giant amongst the pygmies of contemporary Russian literature, or towering physically over his fellow writers, with one cartoonist actually portraying him as Ilya of Murom astride his mighty steed in a parody of Vasnetsov's famous 1898 painting of the three bogatyrs (with Korolenko as Dobrinya Nikitich and Chekhov as Alyosha Popovich).³⁸ It is not surprising, then, that many visitors making the pilgrimage to visit the great sage of Yasnaya Polyana, and expecting to encounter a giant, were disconcerted to discover that Tolstoy was actually quite small.³⁹

After the deaths of their father and grandmother in 1837 and 1838, it took time for the young Tolstoys to settle down, and there was to be one more major upheaval for the family. In August 1841, on Tolstoy's thirteenth birthday, his pious aunt Aline died during a prolonged stay at the Optina Pustyn Monastery, her already fragile health undermined by the strict fasting required of devout Orthodox believers. It was the deep spiritual wisdom of Optina's elders which had drawn Tolstoy's aunt Aline. After her death, guardianship of her three nephews and niece Masha, who legally were still minors (only Nikolay, the eldest had reached the age of eighteen), passed to her younger sister Pelageya, who had been named after their mother but was known in the family as Polina. The young Tolstoys barely knew their other aunt as she had remained in Kazan after their grandfather's death. In 1818, when she was twenty, she had married a retired colonel from the Hussars, Vladimir Yushkov. Nikolay Tolstoy now wrote to Vladimir Ivanovich on behalf of his siblings in polished French:

We all ask our auntie — I, my brothers and my sister - not to leave us in our grief, and to become our guardian. You have to imagine, Uncle, the full horror of our situation. Please, Uncle, don't refuse us, we ask you in the name of God and the departed [Aunt Aline]. You and Auntie are our only support in the world.⁴⁰

Because her husband had at one time nurtured romantic feelings for Toinette, and because she still harboured a grudge against her, Polina decided her brother's children should relocate to Kazan. It would have been much more natural for Aunt Toinette to continue in loco parentis, but as a very distant relative, she was obliged to acquiesce with Polina's wishes. None of the children wanted to go, nor did they want to leave their beloved Aunt Toinette, who now went to live with her sister Elizaveta. In November 1841 the Tolstoys started packing up their belongings once again.