Tolstoy was born in 1828, on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month in the year, and twenty-eight became his lucky number. He had become so superstitious by the time he reached adulthood, in fact, that in 1863 he ordered his wife to hold on until after midnight so that their first child Sergey could be born in the early hours of 28 June. He was also pleased to discover that the number twenty-eight was particularly significant in mathematics as the second ‘perfect’ number (it is also one of seven ‘magic’ numbers in physics). He would open books of poetry on the twenty-eighth page and wind his watch twenty-eight times. He even wove the number twenty-eight into his fiction: it is a symbolically important number in his last novel Resurrection, which concludes on chapter twenty-eight of its third part. Before making any decision, Tolstoy would toss a coin on to the parquet floor at Yasnaya Polyana, seeing a good or bad omen in whether it rolled over an odd or even number of the wooden squares.10 It was also no coincidence that Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for the last time near the end of his life on 28 October (he was eighty-two when he died). He probably inherited his superstitious nature from his grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna, but it is a surprising trait to discover in someone who prided himself on the rationality of his thought.
Tolstoy was also superstitious about objects, such as the old leather couch on which he was born. Made by one of old Prince Volkonsky’s serfs, it was ritually taken from Nikolay Ilyich’s study and carried upstairs to Maria Nikolayevna’s bedroom in the corner of the house for the birth of each of their five children. Eleven of Tolstoy’s own children were born on it, not to mention two of his grandchildren (after five stillbirths, his eldest daughter Tanya gave birth to his favourite granddaughter Tanya on it in 1905).11 Along with his desk, the couch was a permanent piece of furniture in each of the four rooms Tolstoy used as his study at Yasnaya Polyana at different times of his life, and it also makes an appearance in his novels. A very similar-sounding couch is brought out of Prince Andrey’s study for the birth of his son in War and Peace, and in one of the drafts of Anna Karenina it is also mentioned as a Levin family heirloom with a similar function.
Tolstoy’s earliest memories were of being tightly swaddled as a baby, and screaming at being unable to stretch out his arms. ‘I feel the injustice and cruelty, not from people, as they pity me, but of fate, and of pity for myself,’ he wrote in the autobiography he began when he was fifty. He was uncertain as to whether this memory – of the complexity and contradictoriness of his feelings rather than of his cries and suffering – was not, in fact, a composite of many impressions, but he was sure this was the ‘first and strongest impression’ of his life. Tolstoy also claimed (rather improbably) to have recalled his ‘tiny body’ being bathed in a wooden tub by his wet-nurse Avdotya Nikiforovna, a peasant engaged from the village. His next memories date from when he was four, and lying in a cot next to his younger sister Maria. By this time, his mother had already died. We can only regret that ‘My Life’, as it was provisionally called, petered out after the first few vivid pages of his earliest recollections. The same happened with the memoirs he began a quarter of a century later, which cover only his early childhood.12
Maria Nikolayevna died in 1830 not long after the birth of her only daughter, also christened Maria. She had been married for eight years, and had led a very quiet life at Yasnaya Polyana. As Tolstoy records in his memoirs, it was nevertheless a peaceful and happy time, her days taken up with raising her family, and her evenings devoted to reading aloud to her mother-in-law. The one member of her family she did not see so much of was her husband, who was embroiled in endless court cases concerning his late father’s disastrous financial affairs, and often away. This was not easy for her, and she would sit for hours watching for his return in the gazebo in the corner of the estate. Her husband was obliged to write her letters reassuring her he had not forgotten her. ‘My sweet friend,’ he wrote to her in June 1824, ‘you finish your last letter by asking me not to forget you; you are going mad: can I forget that which constitutes the most noble part of myself?’ (‘Ma douce amie, tu finis ta dernière lettre avec une recommendation de non pas t’oublier; tu deviens folle: puis-je oublier ce qui fait la partie la plus élevé de moi même …’)13 Even when Nikolay Ilyich was at home, he was often out hunting, or according to one salacious claim, secretly pursuing other women.14 There was certainly some kind of romantic entanglement with a neighbour after his wife’s death, but Nikolay Ilyich was by all accounts an attentive husband, and he became a conscientious father as a single parent, devoted to his five children.
Tolstoy remembered his father well, even though he too died young. His father was by far the most important person in his life during his early years, and as Tolstoy himself was later to acknowledge, he did not realise quite how much he had loved him until after his death. Tolstoy describes him being of average height, well built, with pleasant features and a ruddy complexion, but with eyes which were always sad. The Tolstoy children loved their father for the funny stories he told, and the enchanting pictures he drew for them. He was clearly a charismatic man in many ways, but what Tolstoy later claimed to have particularly loved and admired about his father was his independent spirit and clear sense of his own dignity.15
Nikolay Ilyich was quite a gentle man, and he was certainly more lenient with his serfs than the previous master of Yasnaya Polyana, Prince Volkonsky. He also rarely resorted to corporal punishment, unlike many sadistic Russian nobles at that time. Nikolay Ilyich was a keen reader: he added substantially to the library his youngest son would one day inherit by purchasing quantities of French classics and works about natural history. Tolstoy was later informed by his aunts that his father never bought new books until he had read the ones he already owned, but he doubted whether his father really had waded through all those dusty French tomes on the history of the Crusades.16 Nikolay Ilyich was also artistically gifted, and produced many fine watercolours of idyllic rural landscapes and pen-and-ink drawings, including a sensitively drawn sketch of a spirited Bashkirian horseman in native costume with bow and arrow.17
Tolstoy cherished his memories of his father cracking jokes at the dinner table, and of being allowed to come and sit beside him on the fabled leather sofa in his study while he smoked his pipe. There was one occasion when Nikolay Ilyich was particularly impressed with the pathos with which his youngest son Lev read aloud Pushkin’s poem ‘To the Sea’, which he had learned by heart.18 The poem was written in 1824, when Pushkin was taking leave of the south after his period of exile, and by the time the young Tolstoy came to recite its lines a decade later, the fateful duel which killed the young poet in 1837 was only a few years away. The ocean was probably the one element which would never hold any attraction for Tolstoy. He lived in the heartland of Russia for nearly all his long life, far from any salt water, so may not later have identified with the sentiments in Pushkin’s last stanza, in which the poet speaks of carrying into the ‘woods and silent wildernesses’ of Russia the sea’s cliffs and coves, and the sound of its waves. But as if to compensate, Tolstoy was moved to shed an ocean of salty tears over his lifetime by music or stories of suffering. The emotional sensitivity his father noticed in him as a young boy rendered him very susceptible to crying: it was not for nothing that one of his nicknames as a child was Lyova-Ryova – ‘Lyova the howler’.