Tolstoy (13 page)

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).
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.

4. YOUTH

'I have read all of Rousseau, all twenty volumes, including the
Dictionary of Music.
I did more than admire him - I worshipped him. When I was fifteen, I wore next to my skin a medallion with his portrait rather than a cross. Many of his pages are so close to me that it feels like I wrote them myself.'

Tolstoy in conversation with Paul Boyer, 1901
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THE MOVE TO KAZAN
spelled the end ofTolstoy's innocence. When he was fourteen, he lost his virginity, and he would later define the subsequent twenty years as a period of 'crude dissolute living in the service of ambition, vanity, and, above all, lust'.
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The five and half years Tolstoy spent in Kazan were certainly not the happiest in his life, and few of his memories of this time were fond ones. Nevertheless, it was during his adolescence that he embarked on the intense self-analysis which culminated in the writing of his first fictional masterpieces. From the outset, Tolstoy conducted his self-analysis on the page. At the age of eighteen, shortly before he left Kazan to return home to Yasnaya Polyana, he began to keep a diary. It was with his first diary entries in March 1847 that his turbulent creative journey began, rather than with the completion of his first piece of fiction in 1851, or the publication of his first work a year later. This diary, which was to become the engine-room of his writing and which he kept on and off for the rest of his life, became increasingly voluminous in his last decade and fills fourteen volumes of his collected works.

As with the move to Moscow in 1837, the Tolstoys' relocation to Kazan in November 1841 was a major undertaking, even without accompanying adults. The smallest and most remote of the Tolstoy properties was sold to pay outstanding debts, and then the family's belongings were loaded on to a number of barges to make their slow way down to Kazan via the Oka and Volga rivers. The family's belongings, of course, included numerous serfs, including tailors, decorators, carpenters and cooks, on whom they would depend for their well-being in their new home. The four brothers and their sister set off later, and travelled overland by sleigh, via Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and the Chuvash capital of Cheboksary, one of the ports on the Volga. They settled upon arrival in Kazan into the ground and mezzanine floors of a centrally located house; their landlords occupied the top floor. It was not far from the river and one of the city's monasteries, but its windows looked out on to the prison. The Tolstoys' servants had separate lodgings.
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Kazan was not like other Russian cities, as would have been immediately apparent to the new arrivals, for there were minarets alongside the domes of its many churches. Until 1552 Kazan had been the centre of a powerful Tatar khanate which had gradually adopted Islam as its state religion. After Kazan was conquered by Ivan the Terrible (who celebrated his first great victory over former Mongol lands by building the oriental-looking St Basil's in Moscow's Red Square), the city was populated by Russians, and its small remaining Tatar population would henceforth become a persecuted minority. The miraculous survival, after one of the city's many fires, of the venerated icon of Our Lady of Kazan in 1579 is testament to the vigour with which the new Russianisation policy was pursued in this former Islamic kingdom. And the fact that it was to Our Lady of Kazan that the Russian army's commander-in-chief Mikhail Suvorov appealed for help after Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, meanwhile, is testament to the esteem in which this icon came to be held. In 1813 Suvorov was for this reason buried in the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg; it was here that a precious copy of the original icon was kept, and it now became the chief memorial to Russia's victory over Napoleon in the city.

Kazan never lost its Tatar character entirely. Catherine the Great had permitted mosques to be built again in Kazan towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the university founded in the city in 1804 rapidly became a major centre for oriental studies. The very foundation of Kazan University, where all the Tolstoy boys became students, speaks volumes about the city's importance nationally. Until Alexander I's famous 1804 statute, the only universities in the Russian Empire were located in Moscow, Dorpat and Vilna, the last two of which provided an education delivered in German and primarily for the benefit of their elite Baltic German populations. In 1804, these three were joined by two new universities in European Russia (St Petersburg and the Ukrainian city of Kharkov), and a third in the distinctly Asian setting of Kazan, some 750 miles south-east of St Petersburg. It was also in Kazan that the first state lycée was founded outside Moscow and St Petersburg, but as the Russian nobility preferred to educate their offspring at home, the younger male Tolstoys continued to be privately taught after moving to Kazan.

Kazan was a provincial city, but by the standards of provincial Russian cities at the time it was exceptional, and its university was a major reason behind the Tolstoys' relocation there. Soon after they arrived in November 1841, Nikolay became a second-year mathematics student, having failed the exam to transfer to the third year at Moscow University.
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He graduated in 1844, then joined the army, and was soon transferred to the Caucasus. His younger brothers, meanwhile, started to prepare for their entrance examinations with tutors. Sergey and Dmitry both entered Kazan University in August 1843 to study mathematics like Nikolay, and Lev followed in 1844. Their sister Maria had a German governess, then was educated at the newly founded Rodionov Institute for girls in Kazan.
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By all accounts Aunt Polina had very little impact on the upbringing of the young Tolstoys, nor was she in any serious way involved with it. Radically different from her reclusive and abstemious late sister Aline, she was a social butterfly for whom good taste was everything. According to her nephew Lev's subsequent reminiscences, she was a kind and pious woman, but rather frivolous. She was also vain, and clearly flattered by the chance now given to her to step into the role of saviour to the orphaned Tolstoys, but she was too busy socialising to exert any moral authority over her young charges, who now had the chance to go wild. Polina's marriage was unhappy, and her husband was frequently unfaithful, so she seems to have drowned her sorrows in parties: the Yushkovs had a reputation for entertaining in style, and boasted one of the best chefs in town. Polina's main contribution to the Tolstoy boys' upbringing was to give each of her nephews their own personal serf, in the hope that each of them would become in time a faithful and devoted servant.
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Dmitry was given Vanyusha, whom he mistreated, according to his younger brother. Tolstoy could not remember Dmitry actually hitting Vanyusha, but he did have clear memories of him begging contritely for forgiveness.
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Dmitry soon radically changed his ways and became a fervent Christian, although he never lost his irascible temperament.

Dmitry is a shady figure in Tolstoy's life - he was the first of the brothers to die, at the age of twenty-nine, and does not appear ever to have been close to his siblings - but he looms large in Tolstoy's memoirs of their life in Kazan. It was really only in Kazan, in fact, that Tolstoy's real memories of Dmitry began. Unlike his brother Lev, just one year younger than him, who confessed to preening and being conscious of his appearance even before they moved to Kazan, Dmitry never had any aspirations to being
comme il faut.
With rare exceptions he was serious and quiet, particularly after he started to attend church regularly and observe all the fasts, like Aunt Aline before him. As the youngest, Lev had a tendency to envy all his elder brothers, and what he envied in 'Mitenka' was his indifference to other people's opinions about him, which he believed was a trait inherited from their mother.
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Indeed it was only because of Mitenka's unkempt appearance that he came to the attention of his far more image-conscious siblings, who were embarrassed by him. Dmitry had no interest in dancing or attending social events, nor did he spend much time with his family, and he stuck rigidly to his student's uniform. Tolstoy retained a strong memory of Dmitry's tall, thin frame, his sad, large, brown, almond-shaped eyes, and the nervous tic he developed during his first serious bout of fasting, when he would jerk his head, as if his tie was too tight. Tolstoy would draw heavily on this and other aspects of Dmitry's life when he came to create the character of Levin's brother Nikolay in
Anna Karenina.

As the grandchildren of the former governor of Kazan, the Tolstoys were invited to all the best households in town, and they thoroughly enjoyed becoming acquainted with the local aristocracy - all except Dmitry, who only ever befriended one poor, bedraggled student who went by the unfortunate name of Poluboyarinov (apart from simply sounding clumsy, the name implies someone who is only 'half-noble'). Otherwise Dmitry preferred to spend his time in church. Rather than go to the fashionable university church, he went to the one attached to the prison opposite their house, and at Easter probably spent more time there than at home. It is the custom for excerpts from the four Gospels concerning Christ's Passion to be read out on Good Friday, but this church's very strict priest unusually insisted on all four Gospels being read out in their entirety. Since the Orthodox Church requires its parishioners to stand for services, the congregation would have been on its feet for a very long time indeed, but this was probably welcomed by Dmitry, who had a tendency to apply himself with almost masochistic zeal to anything he cared passionately about.
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When casting his mind back to his years in Kazan, Tolstoy readily acknowledged that he and his siblings were far too 'obtuse' to appreciate the unusual moral purity of their brother as adolescents. Like their fashionable friends in Kazan, they instead 'continually subjected him to ridicule', as Tolstoy recounts in
Confession,
even nicknaming him Noah.
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Dmitry's remarkable altruism was perhaps best observed in his relationship with Lyubov Sergeyevna, the illegitimate child taken in at some point by the Tolstoy family out of pity. In Kazan, Lyubov Sergeyevna was taken in by Aunt Polina, and Tolstoy's memories of her date from this time. They were not very affectionate memories. Lyubov Sergeyevna was a 'strange and pathetic creature', he later recorded, who suffered from some ailment which made her face puff up as if stung by bees. During the summer months she was insensitive to the numerous flies that settled on her face, which made her even more unpleasant to look at. In Tolstoy's recollection she had only a few strands of black hair and no eyebrows, and found it physically difficult to speak, probably as a result of a tumour. He also recalled that she also always smelled bad, and lived in a suffocating and equally malodorous room whose windows were never opened. When Tolstoy became aware of Lyubov Sergeyevna she was 'not only pitiful but repellent', and most of the family did little to conceal their feelings of revulsion. Dmitry, however, went out of his way to listen and talk to her, and become her friend, not giving the slightest sign that he regarded what he was doing as philanthropy. Impervious to his family's opinion of him, he just did what he thought right. Nor was his selfless behaviour a fad. He remained close to Lyubov Sergeyevna until her death in August 1844, when he completed his first year at university.
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