Tolstoy (7 page)

2. ARISTOCRATIC CHILDHOOD

Levin could barely remember his mother. His idea of her was a sacred memory for him.

Anna Karenina,
Part One, Chapter 27
¹

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.
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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 a
culte
of his mother, and as an old man was still thinking about her when he went on his solitary morning walks round the estate.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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).
¹¹
Along 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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