Tolstoy (6 page)

Over time, another nineteen buildings appeared in the grounds, a few of which were built in brick, such as the ice house and a threshing barn, but most in wood. They joined a classically proportioned building already standing, which had been used to house a small carpet factory. Later it accommodated the family's servants, and became known as the 'Volkonsky House'. Nikolay Sergeyevich was kept busy. Apart from the main family house he built stables, a coach-house, further living quarters for the servants, a bath-house and a summer-house. He also built two orangeries, linked by a gallery, in which to grow exotic fruits for his table such as melons and peaches. This gallery (which burned down in 1867) was a favourite haunt for Tolstoy when he was growing up. To judge from an evocative passage in his early work
Youth,
on summer nights he liked to come and sleep in the gallery, from where he could see the lights in the main house gradually being extinguished, listen to the sounds of the night and feel he was part of nature.

Nikolay Sergeyevich seems to have had a finely tuned aesthetic sense. Tolstoy records proudly in his memoirs that what he built was not 'only solid and comfortable but extremely elegant'.
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Volkonsky also brought his taste and discernment to bear on the landscaping of the property. First of all he built a ha-ha running round its perimeter, then some iron gates at the front entrance positioned between two large round white towers.
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These were hollow so that the watchman could seek shelter during inclement weather. Then, as now, the gates opened on to an avenue lined with birch trees leading up to the manor house, which was wide enough for a troika or a coach and four. This was the famous 'Preshpekt', and a similar driveway is mentioned in
War and Peace
in the description of the Bolkonsky estate Bald Hills, which bears many similarities to Yasnaya Polyana.

Volkonsky laid a lawn in front of the main house, which he edged with two tree-lined paths running parallel to the main avenue, but he kept the French-style miniature park of pollarded lime trees. The park was given the name "The Wedges" due to the network of paths traversing it in a 'square and star' formation. Soon the natural song of nightingales and orioles who liked to cluster in the branches of the park's densely planted trees was augmented by music performed by Volkonsky's serfs, who had been specially trained for the purpose. According to Tolstoy, Volkonsky loathed hunting, but he loved plants, flowers and music, and kept a small orchestra for his and his daughter's entertainment. By the standards of someone like Count Sheremetev, who maintained a company of singers, dancers and musicians, and staged full-scale theatrical performances of the latest French operas, or Prince Naryshkin, who had enough serfs to play in a forty-piece horn band, with each playing only one note, Volkonsky's artistic ambitions were quite modest. It was nevertheless common for Russian landowners to train their more talented serfs to perform for them.
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One day, long after his grandfather's death, Tolstoy found some wooden benches and stands arranged round an enormous elm tree in the park: this was where Volkonsky liked to stroll in the early morning to the accompaniment of music
en plein air.
As soon as the prince left the park, the orchestra would fall silent, and the musicians would go back to their normal duties digging the garden or feeding the pigs. In one of the drafts for
War and Peace
Tolstoy describes eight bewigged serfs in jackets and stockings standing on the gravel in the middle of the park, surrounded by lilac and rose bushes, tuning their instruments at seven in the morning, ready to burst into a Haydn symphony the minute they receive word that their master is awake.

As the nineteenth century wore on, the passion amongst aristocratic Russian landowners for the regularity of formal gardens in the style of Louis XIV was superseded by an enthusiasm for more 'natural' English landscaping. Nikolay Sergeyevich shared this enthusiasm. His next project was to create a much wilder 'English park' from the sloping contours of the lower part of the estate by the entrance towers. Volkonsky also created a cascade of ponds, whose banks were planted with rose bushes. Tolstoy enjoyed walking in this part of Yasnaya Polyana because it was where his mother most liked to spend her time. It was in her memory in 1898 that he restored the little gazebo on stilts from where she used to watch the traffic passing on the road outside. Later on, she would sit there waiting for her husband to come home. It was Maria Volkonskaya who planted the silver poplars round the edge of the Middle Pond, and the shrubs and fir trees lower down. On the other side of the entrance towers was the Big Pond, half of which was traditionally given over for use by the local peasants.

One thing missing from the traditional estate ensemble at Yasnaya Polyana was a church. Possibly this was because Nikolay Sergeyevich believed his family could rely on the church down the road, where his ashes were transferred in 1928. As a student of Voltaire, however, and a child of his time, it is more likely that he simply had no interest in building a church. This did not prevent him having dozens of theological books in his library, not to mention a twenty-volume edition of the Bible and accompanying exegesis. They sat next to works by Racine, Virgil, Montaigne, Rousseau, Homer, Plutarch and Vasari, to mention just some of the authors collected by Nikolay Sergeyevich. There were also plenty of books which he bought for the education of his daughter.
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The Russian country estate was many things — family seat, arena for artistic performance, rural retreat — but it was also a centre of agricultural production. As such, it reinforced the patriarchal ways which impeded Russia's modernisation, since the arcadian idyll of the country estate was made possible by the peasants who sustained it. In terms of his wealth in human beings, that is to say, serfs, Volkonsky was a middle-ranking aristocrat, since he only had 159 'souls' at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was in the majority. In early nineteenth-century Russia only three per cent of the nearly 900,000 members of the nobility owned more than 500 serfs. Nevertheless, it was free labour, and the peasants got a very raw deal, particularly after 1762, when the nobility were 'emancipated' from state service. The serfs had to wait another hundred years before they were emancipated in 1861. Until then, they were unable to own property, and could not marry without the permission of their owner, who had the right to subject them to corporal punishment or exile them to Siberia at whim.

There were some Russian landowners who abused their unlimited powers, and treated their serfs with unimaginable cruelty. Nikolay Volkonsky was not one of those. Like other landowners, he treated Yasnaya Polyana as his own private kingdom but was, it seems, only mildly despotic. He may have forced his musicians to double up as swineherds, but he did not beat them. He may have had a succession of children with his servant Alexandra, whom he sent off to the orphanage, but he did not keep a harem as some landowners did. Volkonsky's relationship with his serfs features heavily in Tolstoy's memoir of his grandfather, whom he clearly idolised. He recalls, for example, how his grandfather built fine accommodation for his servants, and ensured they were not only well fed and dressed but also entertained. 'My grandfather was considered a very strict master,' he wrote, on the basis of his conversations with some of the older Yasnaya Polyana peasants, 'but I never heard any stories of his cruel behaviour or punishments, so usual at that time.'
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At the same time he admitted that his grandfather probably did overstep the mark on occasion. Later on in his memoirs, he recalls Nikolay Sergeyevich's particular fondness for Praskovya Isayevna, the housekeeper, who represented the 'mysterious old world' of Yasnaya Polyana. If Tolstoy based old Natalya Savishna in
Childhood
on her as faithfully he claims in his memoirs, then at a much earlier stage of her life, when she had been halfway along her career path from maid to housekeeper and was working as a nanny, Praskovya was banished by Nikolay Volkonsky to work in a cowshed in a distant estate in the steppes. Her crime had been to fall in love with one of Prince Volkonsky's footmen, and to have asked Nikolay Sergeyevich's permission to marry him. She proved so irreplaceable, however, that within six months, she was brought back and installed in her former position, at which she apparently fell at Prince Volkonsky's feet and begged for forgiveness.

Maria Volkonskaya was seven when her father took her to live in Yasnaya Polyana, and it would be her home for the rest of her life. Until then, she had barely known her father, who had been away in the army, but he devoted a great deal of time to her during the lonely years of his retirement, and paid particular attention to her education. Four handwritten textbooks containing materials written out by a scribe for Maria Nikolayevna when she was in her teens indicate what her father's priorities were — and also his expectations. She studied mathematics and astronomy (the authorities here being Pythagoras, Plato, Ptolemy and the ancient Babylonians), forms of government (including despotic, monarchical and democratic), classics (the letters of Pliny the Younger were a major source), and agriculture.
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Tolstoy's mother also took a keen interest in the natural world. In 1821, when she was thirty-one, she compiled a detailed 'description of the orchard' at Yasnaya Polyana, naming each of the sixteen varieties of apple growing there. Another time she described what was blooming at Yasnaya Polyana in July: poppies, sweet william, stock, marigold and delphinium.
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Maria Nikolayevna had a good knowledge of five languages, including Russian, which was not all that common amongst upper-class Russian women at that time, for whom French was their first language. In his memoirs Tolstoy also records that his mother was an accomplished pianist, artistically sensitive, and a born storyteller. Apparently her tales were so compelling that the friends who gathered round at balls preferred listening to her to dancing. She wrote many of them down, as well as poems, odes and elegies. One unfinished story is called 'The Russian Pamela, or There are No Rules Without Exceptions'. Inspired by Samuel Richardson's famous 1740 novel about a maid whose virtue is rewarded with marriage to her late mistress's son, Maria's Russian version incorporates a young serf girl being given her freedom before she can marry her noble suitor, Prince Razumin. The character of Prince Razumin (whose name means 'Reason') is clearly a thinly disguised portrait of her father. He is described as a man with an excellent mind and noble in spirit, who imposes very strict rules but has a kind, sensitive heart. He is a man who knows his own worth, demands respect and obedience from his subordinates and high standards from his children, considers himself superior to others and is proud of his high birth. A similar portrait would emerge when Tolstoy sat down to describe the character of old Prince Bolkonsky in
War and Peace,
although there were some important fundamental differences — Maria Nikolayevna was a devoted daughter like Princess Maria Bolkonskaya, but did not live in a state of discord with her father, as far as can be ascertained from her diary and other sources.
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Very little is known about Maria Nikolayevna's childhood and adolescence, and next to nothing is known about her early adulthood. Nikolay Volkonsky took his daughter for a six-week stay in St Petersburg when she was twenty, so she could be presented in society. She kept a diary, recording her impressions of the Romanov tombs in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral, the paintings by Raphael and Rubens in the galleries of the Hermitage, and the ballet, but there is otherwise scant information about her life at this time. The Volkonskys stayed in the capital with the recently widowed Princess Varvara Golitsyna, with whose family Nikolay Sergeyevich had become very friendly. Portraits were exchanged as Maria Nikolayevna had been betrothed from childhood to one of the Golitsyns' ten sons, but he died of fever before the wedding. Tolstoy believed his mother experienced a profound sense of loss when her fiancé died. (Supposedly, his name was Lev and Tolstoy was named after him, but this is just another family legend that Tolstoy subscribed to, for there was no Lev Golitsyn.)

The second most important emotional attachment formed by Tolstoy's mother seems to have been with her French companion Louise Henissienne, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana from 1819 to 1822. Maria Nikolayevna had already shown a desire for social justice unusual for her time by writing a story about a serf who is given her freedom, and she also befriended a young peasant girl at Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon after her father's death in 1821 she proceeded to cause a scandal in Moscow by selling one of her estates and putting the proceeds in Louise Henissienne's name. The 'ugly old maid' with the 'heavy eyebrows', as malicious tongues referred to Maria Nikolayevna in letters, then created further scandal by arranging for her cousin Mikhail Volkonsky to marry Marie, the sister of her French companion. The following year she almost gave away her Oryol estate to Marie, finally giving her husband 75,000 roubles instead.
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Maria Nikolayevna's relatives found this wilful, headstrong behaviour shocking. Her youngest son Lev would have heartily approved, however. In due course, he would give away all his property.

Tolstoy was bewitched his whole life by thoughts of the mother he never knew, and was almost glad no portrait of her survived, as it meant he could concentrate his mind on her 'spiritual image'. Her old maid Tatyana Filippovna told him when he was growing up that his mother had been self-possessed and reserved, but also hot-tempered. He treasured the idea of her blushing and shedding tears before uttering a rude word, although did not believe she even knew any rude words. And he was convinced that his eldest brother Nikolay probably inherited her best qualities - an unwillingness to judge, and extreme modesty. At the age of thirty-two, Maria Nikolayevna probably thought she would never marry, but she was then introduced by relatives to Nikolay Tolstoy, who was four years her junior and a distant relative (her great-grandmother Praskovya was his great-aunt). She was wealthy; he was in need of money. They were not in love, but they married in June 1822.