Tolstoy (9 page)

Foreshadowing the path later taken by her nephew, Aline consistently gave her money away to the poor, maintained the simplest of diets and paid no attention to her external appearance, to the point of looking extremely unkempt; her nephew was clearly pained in his memoirs to have to comment on the rancid smell he remembered her exuding. At the same time he recalled her radiant expression and good-natured laughter, and his childhood memory of how uniformly kind she was to people, whatever their background, must have sunk deep into his consciousness. Aunt Aline may have had a far greater impact on her nephew's character than he realised.

Aline was an important person in Tolstoy's life, but he was not as close to her as he was to his aunt Toinette, who had been taken in as an orphaned child by Tolstoy's grandparents. Tolstoy supposed she must have been very attractive as a young girl with her mass of curly dark hair tied severely into a thick braid, agate-black eyes and a vivacious expression. He never stopped to ponder whether she was beautiful or not when he was a boy, but simply loved everything about her — her eyes, her smile, her slender hands and her warm personality. Toinette spoke better French than Russian, was a fine pianist and, like Aunt Aline, kind to everyone around her, including the servants. She may never have stopped to consider questions of social justice, according to Tolstoy, and she accepted the existence of serfdom as a fact of life, but he emphasises in his memoirs that she used her position of privilege only to serve people. She was also adamantly opposed to the family's serfs receiving corporal punishment of any kind. Tolstoy could not indeed remember her uttering even one harsh word in all the thirty years he knew her. She was a strong-willed and selfless person, he recollected in his memoirs, but her most important defining feature was love. Her whole life was love, Tolstoy wrote, but for just one person — his father. Despite wishing otherwise, Tolstoy was aware that she loved him and his siblings because of his father, and her affection for everyone else came also as a natural consequence of loving him.

Toinette was two years older than Nikolay Ilyich, with whom she had grown up, and she remained devoted to him, but like Sonya in
War and Peace,
she stepped aside so he could find a bride with a large dowry and thus have some hope of settling his father's enormous debts. Just as selflessly, Toinette became good friends with Maria Nikolayevna after his marriage. Six years after his wife died, perhaps prompted by fears for his health, Nikolay Ilyich proposed marriage to Toinette, but she declined, apparently not wanting to ruin what Tolstoy describes as her 'pure, poetic' relations with the family. She never spoke about this proposal, but she did accept Nikolay Ilyich's second request: to become a mother to his children and never leave them. Tolstoy declares in his memoirs that it was his aunt Toinette who taught him the 'spiritual pleasure' of love. She never imparted instruction on how to live, or on the reading of morally edifying literature, nor did she ever talk about religion or how to pray. It was not words but Toinette's 'whole being' which infected Tolstoy with love as a boy. Her moral and spiritual life was something which was completely internalised, and which manifested itself outwardly only in the supremely serene, unhurried and humble way in which she lived from day to day. This was something Tolstoy regarded as one of the greatest influences on his life.
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Tolstoy can be forgiven for not remembering everybody in his early childhood. With all the Tolstoys and their dependants, not to mention the large number of servants who also had to be accommodated, the Yasnaya Polyana house must have been quite a warren in the early 1830s. Not until well into his memoirs does Tolstoy remember another person who joined their family at some point in his early childhood — a girl called Lyubov Sergeyevna, another illegitimate child born out of wedlock who was taken in out of pity. Like Pashenka and Dunechka, she did not have an easy life, but the Tolstoys did their best for her, even attempting, but failing, to matchmake between her and Fyodor Ivanovich, the children's German tutor.
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Fyodor Ivanovich was another person who always seemed to be there in Tolstoy's childhood. He arrived in the summer of 1829 to take charge of Nikolay, who was then already six years old.

Foreign tutors were a fixture in Russian noble households, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, before serfdom was abolished. The offspring of aristocratic families did not, by and large, go to school, nor indeed was it feasible when so many of them grew up on remote country estates. Instead, tutors and governesses were imported, chiefly from France, Germany and England, and occupied a sometimes uneasy position in their new households between their employers and the domestic staff. Thus it was in the Tolstoy family. Fyodor Ivanovich was the Russian name the Tolstoys gave to Friedrich Rossel when he began his employment at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy does not say much about him in his memoirs, but points instead to the fact that his portrait of the German tutor Karl Ivanovich in
Childhood
was very true to life (and once even referred to Fyodor Ivanovich as Karl Ivanovich in one of his letters). He was a very kind and decent man, and beloved by the Tolstoy children, to whom he was devoted, but rather naïve, and not particularly well educated. The Tolstoy children all learned to speak good German — but with a distinct Saxon accent.
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The other important people in Tolstoy's early life, of course, were the servants — the nannies, butlers, valets, chefs, waiters, wine stewards and coachmen who were part of every Russian noble household during the years of serfdom. Some of them lived in the main family house; others in the grounds of the estate. As a baby, Lev was looked after first by old Annushka, who had been his brother Nikolay's nanny. He remembered her having very dark eyes and one tooth, and the Tolstoy children were both thrilled and scared when they were told she was 100 years old. For Tolstoy, old Anna Ivanovna and the venerable family housekeeper Praskovya Isayevna had a special aura, having worked under his grandfather, Nikolay Volkonsky. Praskovya Isayevna was later immortalised by Tolstoy in
Childhood,
and he later declared that the portrait of Natalya Savishna was true to life.
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The small, dark-skinned Tatyana Filippovna took over from Annushka as nanny to the Tolstoy children. She returned to Yasnaya Polyana after helping to raise Tolstoy's sister's daughters, and helped care for his first-born, Sergey. She later died in the house at Yasnaya Polyana, in the very room where Tolstoy sat writing his memoirs as an old man. He describes Tatyana Filippovna as a simple soul who was completely devoted to his family and was continually exploited by her own family: her good-for-nothing husband and son saw her as a source of ready money. Her brother Nikolay Filippovich was the coachman at Yasnaya Polyana, and he was also loved and respected by the Tolstoy children, who liked the fact that he smelled pleasantly of manure, and had a gentle, melodious voice.

Every Russian landowner had his favourites amongst their servants, and Tolstoy commented that this was particularly true of people like his father, who were passionate about hunting. The preferential treatment Nikolay Ilyich gave the two brothers Petrusha and Matyusha, who were invaluable in the field and doubled up by serving at table at home, meant they were not so popular with other servants, who resented the gifts and other privileges given to them. As was quite common in such cases, when they were given their freedom the brothers did not cope well with the sudden change from their former state of slavery, and never seemed to be satisfied with what they had been given. Neither of them ever married. As a young boy, Tolstoy simply admired them as strong, handsome men, always neatly turned out.

Along with Petrusha and Matyusha, the diminutive, grey-eyed Tikhon (the one who stole Nikolay Ilyich's tobacco on the quiet) also waited at the Tolstoy family table, but he was quite different. He had been a flautist in Nikolay Volkonsky's orchestra, and his second job was to sweep the reception rooms in the house every morning, after which he would sit in the front hall knitting socks. He was a born comic, and very popular with the Tolstoy children when he stood behind their father or grandmother at table and pulled funny faces. He would immediately become motionless again, plate held tight against his chest, as soon as an adult turned round. The mild-mannered, kind Vasily Trubetskoy, the wine steward with the crooked smile, was also remembered with affection, and he was very fond of all the children: he used to delight the Tolstoy boys when they were very small by putting them on a tray and carrying them round the pantry. Tolstoy tells us in his memoirs that as a six-year-old boy he was thunderstruck when he learned that Vasily had been appointed to manage an estate inherited by the family. He later claimed that the moment when Vasily came to give the Tolstoy children a customary kiss on the shoulder that Christmas, after learning of this promotion, was when he first experienced the anguish of confronting change.
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Christmas was the one time of year when the Tolstoy children traditionally mingled with the serfs on the estate. Extending for the whole twelve days until Epiphany, Yuletide in Russia was a particularly jolly time, when the rules of normal life were temporarily suspended, and mummers dressed in colourful and outlandish costumes would go on wild troika rides, or walk from house to house singing carols, and be treated in return to festive food and drink. It was also the custom for serfs to visit their owners. Every Christmas about thirty peasants belonging to the Tolstoy family would come up to the main house in fancy dress (there was always a bear and a goat), or dressed up as the opposite sex. The Tolstoy children also dressed up, giving themselves black moustaches with the aid of a burnt cork, and old Grigory, the former violinist in Nikolay Volkonsky's serf orchestra, would make his annual visit to Yasnaya Polyana to accompany the singing and dancing.
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Happy memories of these festivities, which were continued while Tolstoy's own children were growing up at Yasnaya Polyana, later inspired the enchanting scene in
War and Peace
when the young Rostovs, Natasha, Sonya and Nikolay, get dressed up one evening and travel by sleigh to visit their neighbours.

Foka Demidych, the family butler, had played second violin in the orchestra, but his performances in the 1830s, when Tolstoy was growing up, were restricted to announcing in his blue frock-coat every day at two o'clock that lunch was served, with as much ceremony as possible. The Tolstoys actually lived quite austerely compared with many noble families — apart from a pair of fine gilt-framed mirrors, some Voltaire armchairs and some mahogany tables, the house was decorated in a fairly spartan fashion, with furniture and table linen produced by their own carpenters and weavers. But in other respects the old patriarchal traditions of the Russian aristocracy were studiously maintained. Tolstoy comments proudly in his memoirs that his father did not have to undergo the indignity of having to become a civil servant in Nicholas I's government, and indeed he could not remember ever having even seen an official during his childhood and youth.
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The Tolstoys had various rituals which were faithfully observed. Each day began and ended with members of the family kissing each other's hands, and every Sunday they would troop off to the village church (where the children would try to copy their father, who bowed so low his right hand touched the ground).
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But it was lunch which was the most ritualised occasion in the Tolstoys' daily life. The entire family, including the children and their tutor, would gather in the drawing room to wait for Nikolay Ilyich to emerge from his study, and at the appointed time he would offer his hand to his mother to escort her into the dining room. Servants holding plates against their chests with their left hands would be stationed behind each family member's chair, while guests would be attended to by their own servants. At the end of each meal, Tolstoy's father would be handed his pipe and he would retire to his study;
babushka
would proceed to the drawing room and the children would go downstairs with Fyodor Ivanovich and draw pictures.

Tolstoy was the first to acknowledge how idyllic and privileged his early childhood was. Like so many Russian country estates at that time, Yasnaya Polyana was an almost self-sufficient kingdom, with its own population of serfs to till the fields, milk the cows, chop wood, weave carpets, cobble shoes, groom the horses, breed hounds for hunting, clear paths, complete the accounts, prepare meals, fetch water and do the laundry. It was also a whole world which Tolstoy never had to leave. Yasnaya Polyana provided a sheltered environment for him to grow up in, surrounded by his relatives and an extensive second family of household servants. It was also an elite school where he began his education with a private tutor, and an enormous playground whose woods, ponds, winding paths and streams promised the possibility of endless enticing adventures. Finally, it was a physically beautiful landscape of tree-lined avenues, elegant gardens and tranquil ponds. Tolstoy remained cocooned in this rural paradise for the first eight years of his life; indeed, the most significant journey he made during this period was downstairs, when he left the nursery at the age of five to join his elder brothers and come under the charge of his German tutor.

There are precious few third-person accounts ofTolstoy as a little boy, but his mischievousness stands out even in those few sources. In a letter Aline wrote to Toinette when he was around six, for example, she made a point of saying that it was some time since 'little Lev' had been dismissed from the dinner table, suggesting this had hitherto been a regular occurrence. Tolstoy's 'originality' was also noticed from an early age: his relatives remembered their amusement when the young boy took it into his head one day to come into the drawing room, turn round and bow to everybody present with his backside, throwing his head back, instead of inclining it, and clicking his heels.
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