Tolstoy’s strongest memories of his grandmother were connected with the treat of spending the night in her bedroom with Lev Stepanych, her blind storyteller. In pre-emancipation Russia it was quite common for serfs to become professional storytellers, who could be bought and sold at will by the nobility like pieces of furniture. Lev Stepanych had been purchased for Pelageya Nikolayevna by her late husband, and so he was brought along to Yasnaya Polyana along with the rest of her retinue. He was totally blind, so he had developed an exceptional memory, and was able to recall any story that had been read to him a couple of times word for word.
Tolstoy recalled that Lev Stepanych lived somewhere in the main house, but only appeared in the evening, when he would go upstairs to his grand-mother’s bedroom in preparation for the evening’s storytelling. He would sit in his long blue frock-coat with puffy sleeves on a low windowsill there, and some supper would be brought to him while he waited for Pelageya Nikolayevna to retire. Since he was blind, she undressed in front of him without qualms, and then she and whichever grandchild was with her would climb into bed to get comfortable for that night’s story. Tolstoy vividly recalled the moment when the candle was extinguished in his grandmother’s bedroom, leaving the flickering light of the small lamp burning beneath the icons in the corner. He would see the dim profile of his grandmother tucked up in bed on a mound of pillows, again a vision all in white, this time with a nightcap on her head. At her command, Lev Stepanych’s quiet, steady voice would then launch into a captivating tale – Tolstoy particularly remembered him telling one of Scheherazade’s stories from The Arabian Nights. The story went over the young Lev’s head, but he was transfixed by the sight of the shadow of his grandmother’s profile quivering on the wall.25
Tolstoy’s aunt Aline could not have been more different from her mother Pelageya Nikolayevna, who continued to behave like the grande dame she had once been well into her dotage. Refined and graceful, with dreamy blue eyes and a fair complexion, Aline was fond of reading and she played the harp.26 She scored a great success in Petersburg high society when she came out, and at the age of nineteen, in 1814, she was married off to Karl von Osten-Sacken, son of the Saxon ambassador to Russia, in what was thought to be a brilliant match. The young couple repaired to the family’s Baltic estate, but within a year of the wedding Aline’s husband was showing signs of serious mental illness. Tolstoy tells a gripping story in his memoirs of one incident when the deranged Count von Osten-Sacken shot at his pregnant wife at point-blank range before being permanently committed to an asylum.
Aline recovered (many years later she showed her nephew the scar left by the bullet), but the traumatic experience marked her. She moved back to St Petersburg, but gave birth to a still-born baby. Fearing the effect this would have on her, her family arranged to have her own child replaced with the newly born daughter of a servant they knew about, who was the wife of a court chef. This was Pashenka – Pelageya Ivanovna Nastasina, whom Aunt Aline brought up as her own child. Tolstoy reproduces this story in Part Two of Anna Karenina: Kitty makes friends at the German spa with a Russian girl Varenka, whose background is remarkably similar. Pashenka was about ten years older than Tolstoy, and sickly (she later died of tuberculosis). Neither Tolstoy, who described her as ‘pale, quiet and meek’, nor his siblings seem to have felt she was really their cousin, but she appears in the list he compiled in his memoirs of people he particularly loved in his childhood.
Aline was thirty-three when Tolstoy was born, and by this time she had become exceptionally pious. If it came naturally to Tolstoy later in his life to want to devote his money and energy to helping others, it may have been partly because he grew up with an aunt who practised the Christian principles she preached. She not only spent her time praying, observing the fasts, reading the lives of saints and visiting monasteries, but, like Princess Maria in War and Peace, sought out the company of monks, nuns, religious wanderers, beggars and holy fools. Some of these people came on visits to Yasnaya Polyana, but others virtually lived on the estate, including Marya Gerasimovna, a holy fool. She had spent her youth wandering through Russia in men’s clothes under the guise of ‘Ivan the Fool’, a familiar character from Russian fairy tales. When Tolstoy’s mother was about to give birth for the fifth time, she had asked Marya Gerasimovna to pray that she would finally have a girl. After his sister Masha was born, Marya Gerasimovna became her godmother, and a familiar figure in the Tolstoy household. The touching, naïve faith of their gardener Akim led the Tolstoys to see him as almost another holy fool who lived at Yasnaya Polyana. The children would come across him praying in the main room of the summer house which stood between the two orangeries. Akim talked aloud to God, his ‘healer’, as if he was standing right there in front of him.27
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.28