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.
2
ARISTOCRATIC CHILDHOOD
Levin could barely remember his mother. His idea of her was a sacred memory for him.
Anna Karenina, Part One, Chapter 271
WHEN, TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, visitors to Yasnaya Polyana asked Tolstoy where exactly he was born, he sometimes pointed to the tip of a tall larch growing amongst a clump of trees next to his house. He was not suffering from dementia, nor was he born at the top of a tree, but indicating precisely the former location of his mother’s bedroom on the first floor of the columned mansion built by his grandfather Nikolay Volkonsky, where he spent his early childhood.2 Despite this being the happiest period in his life, and despite his almost fetishistic reverence of his ancestors, particularly his maternal grandfather, Tolstoy sold off his ancestral home in 1854 after heavy gambling losses. The main house did not completely disappear: the neighbouring landowner who bought it dismantled it brick by brick and then rebuilt it on his property about twenty miles down the road. When Tolstoy came back to live permanently at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1850s, he moved into one of the two wings Volkonsky had built on either side of the house and planted some maples and larches in the gaping space between them. Many decades later Tolstoy’s children developed a passionate desire to return their father’s house to its original location between the two wings. It was a hare-brained scheme that came to nothing, but in 1897, when he was sixty-nine, Tolstoy rode over to look at the house again, and seeing it brought back a flood of memories. He walked through its dilapidated rooms and came to a halt in one of the bedrooms. ‘This is where I was born,’ he said, thinking about his mother and the blissful days of his early childhood.3
Tolstoy could not remember his mother, who died before he was two years old, but her idealised image was a constant presence throughout his life, right up until his last years. He openly admitted to one of his early biographers in 1906 that he had a culte of his mother, and as an old man was still thinking about her when he went on his solitary morning walks round the estate.4 In the memoirs he wrote when he was in his seventies, Tolstoy confesses he had often prayed to her soul to help him at moments of temptation when he was younger. Even in his eighties he could not talk about her without crying. On days when he felt particularly melancholy at the end of his life, he still had an intense longing to curl up and be comforted by his mother, who represented for him a ‘supreme image of pure love’.5
By the time Tolstoy was born in 1828, Yasnaya Polyana was getting quite crowded. Maria Nikolayevna had led a mostly secluded and solitary life on the estate while her father was alive. After her marriage to Nikolay Tolstoy in 1822, however, her husband brought various members of his family to live with them. Apart from his venerable mother Pelageya Nikolayevna, by then sixty, there was his younger sister Alexandra Ilyinichna (‘Aline’), who was twenty-seven, and so five years younger than Maria Nikolayevna. Aline came with a ward, Pashenka, who was then about five years old. There was also ‘Toinette’, his distant ‘aunt’ Tatyana Alexandrovna Ergolskaya (pronounced ‘Yorgelskaya’). Her father had been Tolstoy’s grandmother’s cousin, and she was thirty – three years younger than Maria Nikolayevna. All these women were to be important figures in Tolstoy’s life, particularly Aunt Toinette, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana after he inherited the estate. She died when he was in his late forties, and represented a precious link to the parents he lost when he was very young. Three other members of the family also took up residence at Yasnaya Polyana before Tolstoy was born: his elder brothers Nikolay, Sergey and Dmitry, born in 1823, 1826 and 1827, respectively.
Nikolay occupied a special place in his mother’s affections as her first-born. Anxious to inculcate her son with obedience and the right moral qualities, she kept a detailed diary of his behaviour from the age of four, and expressed displeasure at the first sign he showed of cowardice or laziness. She also deplored manifestations of sentimentality, such as when Nikolay shed tears after reading about a bird being shot, or when he was frightened by a beetle. Maria Nikolayevna wanted her son to be brave, stoic and patriotic, and she allowed him to wear a sabre as a reward for good behaviour. She also discouraged vanity. Turgenev, with whom Nikolay was friendly many years later, would remark that unlike his youngest brother Lev he indeed completely lacked the abundance of vanity necessary for anyone wishing to become a writer.6
When Lev was born on 28 August 1828, the youngest of four sons, he replaced Nikolay as the chief and final object of his mother’s affections according to Aunt Toinette.7 His mother’s nickname for him was ‘mon petit Benjamin’, but he was christened Lev, the Russian form of Leo. Unlike her father, Maria Nikolayevna was deeply religious, and thought carefully about the names of her children. After her fifth (and final) child was born, she commissioned a small icon featuring images of their five namesakes, and St Leo the Great is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner. Tolstoy’s Christian name certainly seems to have been well chosen: he shared with the fifth-century St Leo (only one of two Popes to be called ‘The Great’) not only noble birth but an astonishing fearlessness. Pope Leo is known to have ridden out to the gates of Rome to confront Attila the Hun, whom he persuaded to abandon his idea of invading Europe. Tolstoy fought with bravery while he was in the army, and once wrestled with a bear while he was out hunting. He also shared literary distinction with his illustrious namesake: St Leo founded what would become an influential prose style called cursus leonicus.
Maria Nikolayevna may also have had in mind the exclusively Orthodox St Leo of Catania when she named her last son, and Lev proved to have even more in common with him. This St Leo is sometimes confused with the other St Leo, but seems to have been a more familiar figure in Russian folklore. It was well known, for example, that one should not look at shooting stars on St Leo’s day – peasants associated Lev katanskii with the verb katat’, meaning to roll (along).8 St Leo of Catania was a bishop who originally came from a noble family in Ravenna. He chose to turn his back on his wealthy background to devote his life to preaching Christianity and serving the poor, and was particularly known for his kindness to pilgrims and beggars. Tolstoy’s life followed a similar pattern, and like Bishop Leo, he came into direct conflict with his government during his lifetime. If St Leo was persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Byzantine Empire for vehemently opposing the destruction of holy images during the iconoclast controversy in the eighth century, however, Lev Tolstoy was the scourge of the Russian Empire for being himself an iconoclast and respecting no authority, including, most famously, the Orthodox Church. Curiously, both St Leo of Catania and Lev Tolstoy were opposed at the end of their lives by apostates called Heliodoros (Iliodor in Russian), who were the cause of great scandals. St Leo’s adversary tried to lure Christians away with the help of the occult, while the renegade Russian monk Iliodor saw Tolstoy as the devil in human form, and only later came to repent. It is curious that Tolstoy began a story called ‘Father Iliodor’ in 1909, at the very end of his life, just when the monk Iliodor was causing his greatest scandals.9