Tolstoy (12 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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),
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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.
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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.
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