As the eldest, Nikolay Tolstoy was revered by his brothers, who all used the polite vy form of address with him (rather than ty). Young Lev admired Nikolay most of all, and describes him in his memoirs as a ‘remarkable boy with a keen artistic sensitivity, a vibrant imagination, and a highly developed moral sense, who was kind and good-natured without ever being smug’. The Tolstoy boys were enthralled by the elaborate games and rituals thought up by Nikolay, who one day promised to take them to the mythical ‘Fanfaronov mountain’ if they carried out to the letter the conditions he set. These included standing in the corner and trying not to think about the white bear, and avoiding seeing a hare for a whole year. In their childhood, the Tolstoy brothers also played at being ‘ant brothers’ by huddling together in a den created from two chairs, a couple of boxes and some shawls. In his adulthood, Tolstoy would continue to believe fervently in the possibility of the ant brothers’ ideal, but writ large, so as to encompass the whole of humanity. In memory of his brother Nikolay, and his aspirations to love and kindness, which he had sought to emulate, Tolstoy requested towards the end of his life to be buried at the spot where the little green stick was supposedly hidden, and this was indeed where he would be laid to rest in November 1910.48
The religious impulse which inspired Tolstoy in the 1880s was strangely not so distant from that which gave rise to the Moravian Brethren. The Moravian Church, which continues to flourish today, dates back to the rebellion against Roman Catholicism mounted by Jan Hus in the late fourteenth century, more than 100 years before Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Hus and his other Czech-speaking followers were based in Bohemia and Moravia, whose Slav populations had been the first to be converted to Eastern Orthodoxy by the Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The ‘Hussites’ were keen to revive those traditions, as well as rejecting the contemporary practice of indulgences ministered by the Catholic Church, to which the local populations had been forcibly converted when they became subjects of the Austrian Empire. The idea of personal salvation based on the individual’s relationship with God was and remains central to the doctrine of the Moravian Church, and Tolstoy would preach something similar many centuries later, when he rebelled against what he perceived as the Orthodox Church’s dependence on ritual and superstition. The early Protestants of Bohemia and Moravia were inevitably persecuted during the Counter Reformation, and in the years which followed, their church went underground. Many of their number eventually emigrated to parts of Europe hospitable to Lutheranism, with whose doctrines they had much in common.
It is intriguing that Tolstoy also has something in common with the founder of the revived Moravian Church, the eccentric Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, whose commitment to serving the poor led him to allow a group of Brethren to form a community on his land in the 1720s. Zinzendorf ended up leaving his position with the Saxon royal court in Dresden, and turning his back on his title and aristocratic lifestyle to live a simple life and devote himself to serving God. It was he who brought unity to the new village established by the immigrants, which led to them adopting a ‘Brotherly Agreement’, and he was key to the Brothers one day experiencing a spiritual transformation which led them to love one another. Tolstoy, of course, never believed he was starting a new church and he also dispensed with all sacraments. But in his appeal to ecumenical ideas of fellowship, and in his preaching of the merits of a simple life of service, he aligned himself with the ideals of the Moravian Brotherhood. As a pioneer ant brother, he would, moreover, definitely have approved of their motto: ‘In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, love’.
3
ORPHANHOOD
I congratulate you, my dear Lyova, and also your brothers and sister, I wish you good health and diligence in your studies, so that you never cause any unpleasantness for dear Auntie Tatyana Alexandrovna, who works so hard for us. Mitya and Lyova, we went on a wonderful walk the other day, we all went to Sparrow Hills, and drank tea there. Since the weather is so good, I imagine you were in Grumant. I hope you have lots of fun. I send love to my dear Masha …
Letter from Nikolay Tolstoy in Moscow to Lev, Dmitry and Masha Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, on the occasion of Lev’s tenth birthday, August 18381
LOOKING BACK OVER HIS LIFE when he was in his seventies, Tolstoy described the ‘innocent, joyful, poetic period’ of his childhood as lasting until he was fourteen.2 Only the first seven of those fourteen years were truly cloudless, however. In the second seven, Tolstoy lost his father, his grandmother and his aunt, was temporarily separated from his elder brothers, and moved three times. The last upheaval resulted in a relocation several hundred miles from home. In a very real sense, the most idyllic part of Tolstoy’s childhood began its decline with the first of those relocations, when the reassuring bucolic surroundings of Yasnaya Polyana were exchanged for the intimidating new world of metropolitan Moscow. It is these years, and the ones immediately following, which are amongst the least documented in what is generally an over-documented life. With a few exceptions, Tolstoy’s memoirs essentially come to a halt with the family’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana, although his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth is also a wonderful source of atmospheric detail about his early years, since it is clearly rooted in his own experience, despite it being a work of fiction.
Tolstoy’s father moved his family to Moscow in January 1837 for the sake of the elder boys’ education. Lev was only eight years old, but his eldest brother Nikolay was now fourteen, and already preparing for his university entrance. The relocation was a major undertaking, since the family was numerous, comprising the five Tolstoy children, two wards, two aunts, Nikolay Ilyich and his mother, and was accompanied by a full complement of thirty servants.3 The journey north lasted two days, and involved a caravan of seven carriages, plus a special closed sleigh for grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna. To make her feel safe, she was chaperoned by two of the family’s manservants, who were forced to endure freezing temperatures and stand on the runners all the way.4 The children took it in turns to sit with their father, and when they finally drove into Moscow, it was Lev who was lucky enough to be sitting next to him as he proudly pointed out the churches and prominent buildings they could see through the carriage windows.5
Arriving from the south, the Tolstoys would have driven through the colourful merchants’ quarter, the Zamoskvorechie (‘Beyond the Moscow river’) and so would have first seen a profusion of onion-domed churches. The merchants were traditionally the most pious section of the Russian population, and the Zamoskvorechie had the greatest concentration of churches in Moscow, which was already a city renowned for its large number of churches. Nikolay Ilyich had rented a handsome house with a mezzanine set back from the street in a spacious courtyard, and after driving through the Zamoskvorechie, the Tolstoy family caravan would have turned west and arrived in a quiet residential area near to the Moscow river. It was to this part of Moscow that Tolstoy returned when his own family moved to the city in the 1880s.
In old age, Tolstoy had only dim memories of these first few months in the old capital. The city had by now fully recovered from the traumatic events of 1812, following an intense period of reconstruction, and the new urban surroundings would have seemed overwhelming for a boy used to a trantranquil rural environment; he now found himself in the midst of buildings and strangers, and no longer the centre of attention. Nikolay was busy preparing for the university, and the Tolstoy children rarely saw their father, who had engaged as many as twelve tutors (including a dancing teacher) to keep his children busy, at an imposing annual cost of 83,000 roubles.6 Meanwhile Nikolay Ilyich had become embroiled in a lawsuit over his purchase of the estate of Pirogovo from Alexander Temyashev, the man who had begged him to bring up his illegitimate daughter Dunechka. Temyashev was stricken with paralysis shortly after the contract was signed, and his relatives wanted the deeds declared null and void. As far as Tolstoy’s father was concerned, however, he was now its legitimate owner. Nikolay Ilyich’s health had been frail ever since his gruelling time in the army during and after the Napoleonic invasion. The stress of having to pick up the pieces and take responsibility after his father’s bankruptcy, dismissal from the governorship of Kazan and untimely death had not helped. Tolstoy’s father also had a tendency to drink too much. In 1836 he had written to a friend to tell him he was on a strict diet and taking medicines after experiencing the shock of coughing up a lot of blood.7