In 1906, aged 77, Tolstoy wrote in his diary:
Was in the dull miserable state all day. By evening, this state changed to one of emotion – the desire for affection – for love. I felt as in childhood like clinging to a loving pitying creature, and weeping emotionally and being comforted. But who is the creature I could cling to like that. I ran through all the people I love – nobody would do. Who could I cling to? I wanted to be young again and cling to my mother as I imagine her to have been. Yes, yes, my dear mother whom I never called by this name since I could not talk. Yes, she is my highest conception of pure love – not the cold and divine, but a warm, earthly, maternal love. This is what attracts my better, weary soul. Mother dear, caress me. All this is stupid, but it is true. (Ds, pp. 395–6)
An acute awareness of his status as an orphan haunted Tolstoy throughout his life. This was aggravated by the early death of his father in June 1837 when Leo was approaching his ninth birthday. The count died suddenly of a stroke during a trip to Tula. There was a suspicion that he had been poisoned by servants. Later Tolstoy said that he never believed these rumours, but was aware of them and must have been deeply affected by the talk of such a crime. These losses most likely contributed to the extreme shyness and sensitivity of Tolstoy, who was known to his relatives as a crybaby. Young Leo was also lagging behind his brothers in studies and was deeply traumatized by his physical unattractiveness. This self-deprecation persisted through his youth: at least until his marriage Tolstoy did not believe that any woman could ever fall in love with such an ugly person as himself – so much for the image of Tolstoy’s blissful happiness as a boy. Yet, while the image may have not been grounded in reality, it was grounded in his literary imagination.
Silhouette of Tolstoy’s mother, 1800s.
The idyllic picture of his early years is most vividly recreated in Childhood, the 1852 novel that brought Tolstoy national literary fame. This exquisite and touching description of the life of an aristocratic boy abounds with autobiographical details and until the present day informs our perception of Tolstoy’s environment, thoughts and feelings in Yasnaya Polyana (‘The Clear Glade’), the family estate near the city of Tula where he spent his formative years. The idyll he describes in Childhood ends with the sudden death of the narrator’s mother. Adolescence and Youth, the next parts of Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy, tell a very different story of psychological difficulties, doubts and hardships.
In Childhood Tolstoy transforms the first and most tragic loss of his life from the early, crushing yet unremembered trauma of a two-year-old into the formative experience of an eleven-year-old boy. This chronological move enables him to portray the joys of childhood that precede the death of the boy’s mother as pure and unmixed with the feelings of deprivation and loneliness that the real Leo experienced from the dawn of his remembered days. The idyllic world of Childhood is as much of a myth as the ideal family described in the Epilogue to War and Peace.
Yasnaya Polyana also remained for Tolstoy mysteriously connected with the vision of universal happiness. Speaking about Tolstoy’s childhood, no biographer ever fails to mention the story of the green stick. During their games, Leo’s elder brother Nikolai would tell his younger siblings that a magic green stick hidden somewhere nearby would make the person lucky enough to find it able to make all humans happy. Little Leo was deeply impressed. He never abandoned his belief in the green stick and the search for it. Several years before his death, he wrote in his memoirs:
as I knew then, that there is the green stick with the inscription that tells us how to destroy all evil in humans and give them the greatest good, I believe now that this is the truth and it will be opened to humans and give them all that it promises. (CW, XXXIV, p. 386)
Around the same time he chose to call an article on his religious opinions ‘The Green Stick’. In his will, Tolstoy also asked to be buried near the place where as a boy he had searched for this treasure.
Numerous female relatives took care of the orphaned siblings. One of them, Tatiana Ergolskaya, usually called Toinette, became for Leo the spirit of Yasnaya Polyana. Brought up as a poor relative in the family of Tolstoy’s grandparents, Toinette was in love with Tolstoy’s father, her second cousin. In an act of self-sacrifice, she had renounced her feelings to allow her beloved Nikolai to marry an heiress. In 1836, a year before his death, hoping to give his children a stepmother who would never leave them, the widowed count proposed to Ergolskaya. She declined, but nonetheless eagerly shouldered the burden of caring for the Tolstoy children. Leo was her clear favourite. Her dubious status in the family is reflected in an unflattering portrait of Sonya’s role in the Rostov household after Nikolai’s marriage in War and Peace. Ergolskaya lived long enough to read the novel, but her reaction to it remains unknown.
Having declined the opportunity to become the children’s stepmother, Ergolskaya also lost the right to be their legal guardian. The sisters of Tolstoy’s father were both considered closer to their nephews. When one aunt, Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in 1841 the children were entrusted to another, Pelageya (Polina) Yushkova, who lived in Kazan. This town on the Volga river, home to one of the six universities in the Russian Empire, seemed a suitable place for the growing children. Kazan was a natural centre for Oriental studies, given that the town and its surrounding region was home to the Volga Tatars, the empire’s largest Muslim minority. After failing to gain admission on his first attempt, Leo was admitted to the Faculty of Oriental Languages when he applied again in 1844.
The main challenges of Tolstoy’s teenage life coincided with the five and a half years he lived in Kazan. First and foremost, he had to handle the conflict between his powerful sexuality and a no less powerful desire for chastity. He knew very well that it was Eros that had ruined the primordial innocence of humanity. In Childhood, Tolstoy describes with the lofty tenderness of an experienced man the emerging erotic feelings of a ten-year-old boy suddenly kissing a girl’s naked shoulder. Expelled from the paradise of early childhood, he must now deal with less touching and delicate emotions.
In Kazan Tolstoy was relatively free from the control of his relatives. Although not rich, he still had money to spend. At the same time, he was extremely shy and unsure of himself, especially in the company of women of his own social standing. Inevitably this combination of factors made him a regular visitor to brothels. Introduced to paid sex by his elder brother at the age of fifteen, Leo would later recall standing weeping by the bed after losing his virginity. This tension between irresistible lust and revulsion, chiefly for his own bestiality, became a recurrent emotional theme, first in his diaries and then in his prose.
Tellingly, it was while being treated for gonorrhoea at the university clinic in 1847 that Tolstoy began the diary he would continue to keep, on and off, for the next sixty years. The most significant interruption coincided with the period he was working on his two main novels. The diary exposes to harsh scrutiny not only the author’s deeds, but his secret thoughts and desires. The level of maniacal self-absorption and self-flagellation to which Tolstoy subjects himself can be shocking to a modern reader. Seeking to live by the highest moral criteria, he sets himself impossible tasks and, time and again, chastises himself for failing to meet them. Reading the diary, one is reminded of Philippe Lejeune’s observation that ‘a diary is rarely a self-portrait, or if it is taken as one, it sometimes seems like a caricature.’1