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.’36 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.37 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.38
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.39
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 Sergey Nikolayevich 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 Henissiènne, 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 Henissiènne’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.40 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.