Tolstoy (49 page)

In late May 1877 Alexeyev returned to Russia, now with Malikov's peasant wife Elizaveta and her two children in tow, one of whom was his. They had been dreadfully homesick in the American plains, and crossed the border on Trinity Sunday (Troitsa) to see young people dancing in the fields through the train window. In pre-revolutionary times, Russians traditionally celebrated Troitsa as the day on which the Holy Spirit descended on all of nature, not just the apostles. 'Green Yuletide', as it was also called in reference to the pagan traditions which accompanied all the major Christian holy days, was a particularly fertile and joyous time, when everything was in full bloom. It was also a date in the calendar particularly associated with youth, so it was a poignant day for Alexeyev to return to Russia—at twenty-nine he was four years younger than his future employer Countess Tolstoy. Trinity Sunday was celebrated at Yasnaya Polyana like everywhere else
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—the Tolstoy children would go to church in their Sunday best bearing armfuls of flowers, then take part in the dancing. Sonya would plant flowers and the local village girls would ask the cuckoos how many years awaited them before they married, calculating their answer from the number of calls they heard.
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Homes and village streets would be decorated with greenery, with bunches of carnations placed behind icons, and a profusion of periwinkles, peonies, cornflowers, violets and lilies placed on window-ledges. When Tolstoy went to worship that morning in May 1877 he would have encountered birch saplings and freshly cut grass and fragrant thyme strewn on the floor of the church. Along with other parishioners he would also have held a birch twig or flowers during the service as symbols of the Holy Spirit coming down to bring renewal.
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As well as the ritual songs and dances that came after church on Trinity Sunday in Russia, village girls at Yasnaya Polyana would weave garlands which they would throw on to ponds and lakes, in the hope they would float—a sign of long life.

Given his moral convictions and his past experiences, Alexeyev was understandably reluctant at first to become tutor to the Tolstoy children. Despite being desperately poor and in need of a job, he recoiled at the idea of coming to live in the house of a count, where meals were served by white-gloved servants. When Tolstoy heard this, however, he took an immediate interest in Alexeyev, and persuaded him to come just for a visit. Alexeyev's doubts vanished as soon as they set off for a walk, during which he was closely questioned about his outlook on life. Tolstoy was a good listener, and Alexeyev was soon unbuttoning himself completely. He felt so uninhibited he even went into propaganda mode and showed Tolstoy the calloused hands he had acquired from all the manual labour he had done in America, imagining he was talking to an upper-class writer who had never picked up a tool. To his surprise, Tolstoy declared they were worth far more than the huge salaries earned by civil servants, and opened up to Alexeyev about his own ideals, sharing with him his despair at not being able to find answers to the questions that tormented him. He even showed Alexeyev the bough in the garden he had considered hanging himself from to escape from his afflictions. Tolstoy carried on talking to Alexeyev in his study for the rest of that day, and by evening Alexeyev had agreed to take the job, accepting Tolstoy's suggestion that he rent the cottage just outside the Yasnaya Polyana gates for his family. Soon he was coming to the house every morning at eight to have coffee with the children before starting lessons in Russian and mathematics with Sergey, Tanya and Ilya. Within a year he felt so at home in the Tolstoy household that he moved with his family into the guest wing which Sonya's sister stayed in during the summer months. The fact that he and Elizaveta were not actually married (which Sonya would not have approved of) was somehow glossed over.

Alexeyev was a gifted teacher and popular, particularly with fourteen-year-old Sergey, who became very attached to him. Sergey was the most musical of the Tolstoy children, and Alexeyev records in his memoirs his pupil playing Chopin's D Flat Major Prelude especially for him. Eleven-year-old Ilya, by contrast, only seemed interested in dogs and hunting, and took great delight in taking his violin outside and playing mournful sounds on it, attracting all the dogs in the vicinity to gather round and start howling in unison.
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There was, however, one time that Ilya also gave a bravura performance of some Chopin during Alexeyev's time as tutor. Tolstoy loved Chopin, and hearing one of his opuses played at an insane tempo with a torrent of mistakes prompted him to come out of his study and put his head round the door to see what was going on. Tolstoy realised that Ilya was playing to an audience. Ilya's
fortissimo
dynamics, with his foot hard down on the pedal, were for the benefit of Prokhor, the family carpenter, who was in the drawing room putting in secondary-glazing panes for the winter. The phrase 'for Prokhor' entered Tolstoy family lore, and was ever afterwards affectionately trotted out whenever any member of the family seemed to be showing off.
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Tolstoy's fondness for Vasily Alexeyev stemmed from the fact that he shared with him the same basic philanthropic impulse to improve the life of the peasantry. This very Russian priority was well summarised by the English positivist Edward Spencer Beesly when characterising Alexeyev's former partner William Frey after his death in 1888:

He was filled with that extraordinary enthusiasm which prompts so many Russians of the well-born and wealthy class to strip themselves of all advantages and cast in their lot with the poorest, humblest and most miserable. I do not know where we are to find anything like it, except in the spirit which so often led persons of rank in the Middle Ages to fly from the world and embrace the privations and humility of monastic life. But among them the motive was unsocial—a selfish desire to save their own souls. These Russians are animated by a burning desire for social improvement. To some of them inequality is in itself shocking—the root and sum of all social evil. They plunge into the humblest life to escape in their own persons from this taint. They cannot be happy till they have freed themselves from it. Others perhaps embrace a life of poverty and manual labour for a somewhat different reason. They desire to spread their political and social aspirations among the mass of their poorer countrymen. They find that they are impeded in doing this by the barriers of rank and wealth. Such is their propagandist ardour, such their faith in their principles, that wealth, comfort, and material advantages of every kind seem to them cheap, if by sacrificing them they can gain the opportunity they desire of approaching and getting the ear of the people. Whatever we may think of the principles and reasoning which lead to this conduct, it is impossible not to admire the sincerity and enthusiasm of those who practise it. They have subdued some of the strongest and most selfish of human impulses, whether they are turning the victory to the best account or not.
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Frey settled in England after the American escapade, but he would find his way to Yasnaya Polyana during the one brief trip he made to Russia before his untimely death, and make a deep impression on Tolstoy.

Alexeyev was convinced Tolstoy would dismiss him once he knew he was a socialist, but his employer was unperturbed.
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Christianity was really the only sticking point in their long and frank conversations. Tolstoy was still a fully paid-up member of the Orthodox Church in 1878, and Alexeyev could not understand this. In an oft-quoted passage in his memoirs, he describes Tolstoy pointing one winter morning to the frosty patterns made on the window pane by the sun, which he compared to popular religious belief. The people see the patterns, he explained, whereas he wanted to look beyond them towards the source of the light. But Tolstoy's faith was intimately linked to popular religious belief, and Alexeyev observed that he went to church not simply to perform the rites alongside peasants, but to study exactly what it was the peasants believed in, because their faith was so strong. Tolstoy also wanted to learn how to make himself more comprehensible in the exposition of his religious beliefs, and over time he grew impatient with the impenetrable and high-flown Church Slavonic of the liturgy. If he himself could barely understand it, what hope was there that the peasants could glean its message? Tolstoy relayed to Alexeyev how in church he would hear the men discussing farming matters, and the women whispering the latest gossip to each other at the most solemn moments of the service, as if it had nothing to do with them. He would stand there hearing the constant thud of fingers on sheepskin as peasants crossed themselves unthinkingly beside him while the lofty language of the liturgy went far above the heads. It began to bother Tolstoy that the Church made so little effort to meet the spiritual needs of the peasants and he started to understand why so many of them were drawn to sectarian religions, which did at least attempt to explain Christ's teaching in plain Russian.

Tolstoy would get up most days around eight in the morning, and his children would usually run out to greet him as he headed downstairs to get dressed. Sometimes he would do a few turns on the parallel bars in the hall before returning upstairs for coffee in the small drawing room, next to the main family dining room. This is when Tolstoy and Alexeyev usually got into conversation, and Sonya was now sometimes alarmed by what she overheard her husband talking about while she was dressing. Having acquired the habit of staying up until the small hours to copy out manuscripts, Sonya tended to get up later, and since their bedroom was next to the drawing room, she could not help overhearing the constant conversations about religion and ethics. She was longing to hear Tolstoy talk about literature again. Writing on religion was never going to be a good earner, even for a writer of Tolstoy's fame. Sonya was unstinting in her praise of Alexeyev as a teacher in her autobiography, and she was happy to declare that Tanya never learned as much from anyone else as she had from him. She recollected Alexeyev's love of hard work, and his warm-hearted, simple nature,
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but in time she would see him as a threat to the family's emotional and financial stability.

At around eleven o'clock every morning Tolstoy would head back downstairs with a cup of tea to go and work in his study, sometimes picking up the first bit of paper which came to hand even if it was an old envelope, in his desire to set down as quickly as possible whatever thought he had in his mind. He would not emerge again until four, which was his time to go riding or for a walk, sometimes breaking off a stalk of sweet-pea by the house to sniff at as he strode along in the summer months, as he loved the scent. At some point he began to take his daily constitutionals with Alexeyev, who often had difficulty keeping up with him. But Tolstoy needed Alexeyev by his side, as he one day confessed to his young friend that he was wildly attracted to a tall young woman called Domna who worked in the servants' kitchen. Her husband had been recruited into the army, and Tolstoy had been following her around and softly whistling to her to catch her attention. Finally he had struck up a conversation with her, and had arranged a rendezvous on a shady path under some nut trees in a distant part of the garden. Tolstoy confessed to Alexeyev that he had set off from the house only to be called back by Ilya, shouting from the window to remind him about his Greek lesson. After that bracing reality check, Tolstoy ensured that Alexeyev always accompanied him on his walks, and took steps for Domna to be 'removed' from view.
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He found that praying was not much help when it came to battling his feelings of lust, but he certainly repented. The incident was to find reflection in a story he wrote in 1889 called 'The Devil', which also drew on his experiences with his peasant 'wife' Aksinya. For obvious reasons, Tolstoy stuffed the manuscript down the back of an armchair to keep it hidden from Sonya, and it was not published until the year after he died.

A new French tutor arrived at Yasnaya Polyana a few months after Alexeyev in January 1878. Hiding behind the false identity of 'Monsieur Nief' was the militant young anarchist Vicomte Jules Montels, who had served as colonel of the 12th Federated Legion in the Paris Commune in 1871. After its two-month reign of power came to an end, Montels had fled to Geneva, where he became an active member of the French exile group of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International), its 'propaganda and socialist-revolutionary action section' to be precise. In 1877, after six years of living with a death-sentence on his head, he found himself in Moscow getting on a train to Tula, disguised as 'Monsieur Nief'. He had been recommended to the Tolstoys by the wife of the Russian priest in Geneva. Sonya had some justification for later exclaiming to her husband, 'You found me two nihilists!' Yasnaya Polyana was beginning to turn into a hotbed of radical left-wing politics.

The Tolstoys learned the full story about their enigmatic French tutor only after he had left their employ in late 1879. In 1880 the Communards were amnestied and the dapper, mustachioed Vicomte Montels returned to France, taking with him the Tolstoys' French-Swiss governess Lucie Gachet. They later married and then moved to Tunisia, where Montels became editor of the
Tunis Journal.
Mademoiselle Gachet had arrived as a French teacher for Tanya and Masha in September 1876,
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at around the same time as the latest English governess Annie Phillips, and had first been hotly pursued by the family's Russian tutor Vladimir Rozhdestvensky. The Tolstoys had been amongst the first Russians to acquire an English croquet set when they became available in Moscow in the 1870s, and they became avid players on warm summer evenings when the air was cooler. Rozhdestvensky took a particular delight in hitting Lucie Gachet's ball in the direction of the pond, telling her he was sending it to the frogs. Like Jules Rey, he had a drink problem, and was soon dismissed, no doubt to Mlle Gachet's relief. Sergey Tolstoy extended sympathy towards the family's young male tutors when he was writing his memoirs much later. They were always on display, as he put it, occupying a difficult position somewhere between servants and employers, and they were usually rather bored. As a consequence, when they were not at loggerheads with each other they tended to develop infatuations with the family's pretty young governesses.