2. The house in Plyushchikha Street, Moscow, to which Nikolay Ilych Tolstoy brought his mother, sister and five children in 1837
In June, a few months after arriving in Moscow, Nikolay Ilyich was obliged to go urgently to Tula to try to deal with the crisis which had blown up over his purchase of Pirogovo. Taking only his faithful servants Petrusha and Matyusha, he covered the distance in half the time it had taken his family to travel to Moscow earlier that year. That also had a deleterious effect on his health.8 The following evening, shortly before his forty-third birthday, he suffered a massive lung haemorrhage and stroke while walking down the street in Tula, and died that same day. Rumours flew about that he had been poisoned by his servants, since all his money appeared to have been stolen, but Tolstoy was later not inclined to believe this story.9
Nikolay Ilyich’s unexpected death was understandably a huge shock to his family. His sister Aline and his eldest son Nikolay travelled down from Moscow, and they buried him next to his wife Maria Nikolayevna in the village cemetery next to Yasnaya Polyana. For young Lev, his father’s death was the most significant event of his childhood, and for a long time he kept expecting to see him one day on the streets of Moscow.10 Babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna, who had doted on her son Nikolay, never really recovered, and the loss was also acutely felt by his sister Aline, and perhaps above all by his distant cousin Toinette, for whom he had been the centre of her world.
It was Aline who now became guardian to the five Tolstoy children, with assistance from one of her late brother’s friends, Sergey Yazykov, who had an estate in Tula province. Sergey Yazykov was also Lev’s godfather, but his involvement was fairly minimal from the start, and even that decreased over time. As well as assuming responsibility for the children’s education, Aline now had to occupy herself with the crude practicalities of selling cattle and organising harvests, since she was now in charge of the considerable income that came from the five disparate properties the Tolstoy children had inherited. Each estate came with a farm, and each farm had complicated accounts that needed to be carefully checked, obliging Aline to deal with uncouth stewards and bookkeepers who could often be truculent and dishonest. Aline was also now responsible for the welfare of the hundreds of serfs who belonged to the Tolstoy family. It was their toil, after all, which enabled the Tolstoys to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. All in all, it was a job for which someone so naïve and otherworldly was ill-qualified, to say the least, as Aline’s chief interests, after all, were spiritual, not material. Nikolay Ilyich had done some intricate and crafty manoeuvring in order to enable his family to live in the manner to which it had become accustomed in Moscow as well as in the country, but he left his financial affairs in a perilous state at the time of his death. All Aline could see were debts.11 And then there was the still-unresolved lawsuit, which would drag on for several more years before finally being resolved in the Tolstoys’ favour.
The Tolstoy children remained in Moscow throughout the hot summer months following their father’s death, when otherwise they would probably have returned to Yasnaya Polyana. Aline was fortunate to be assisted by Aunt Toinette in caring for them. It was Toinette, for example, who took the children to the Bolshoi Theatre for the first time later that autumn. They sat in a box, and as an old man Tolstoy remembered that he had not immediately realised that he should not be looking straight across to the boxes opposite but sideways, down to the stage.12 Even the children’s redoubtable grandmother now took a hand in their upbringing. Prospère Saint-Thomas had been engaged as French tutor for the elder boys, and three days after her son’s death Pelageya Nikolayevna decided to invite the fair-haired Frenchman from Grenoble to become resident governor to her grandchildren, replacing their kindly but not terribly competent German tutor Fyodor Ivanovich, who was consequently demoted. Being impressed by all things French, Pelageya Nikolayevna imagined Saint-Thomas would become the male authority figure that the children needed. The small, wiry Frenchman was certainly dynamic, but Tolstoy bridled at his self-importance and vanity, and he was also not impressed by his grandiloquent rhetorical flourishes.13 Saint-Thomas was also a harsh disciplinarian who forced his pupils to beg forgiveness for misdemeanours on their knees. Worst of all was the moment when he locked the young Lev up and threatened to punish him with the rod. In terms of its significance, the incident was certainly not on a par with his father’s death, but it nevertheless left a very deep impression on Tolstoy – so much so that some sixty years later he recalled in his diary the humiliation and misery of overhearing his family’s laughter and merriment while he was locked up ‘in prison’. In his memoirs, he went so far as to date his lifelong horror of violence back to this ordeal.14 It is telling that Tolstoy should have dwelled on this incident. In 1908 Lenin would famously characterise the ‘tearing off of masks’ as a hallmark of Tolstoy’s fiction and it seems that, at nine years old, Tolstoy was already capable of seeing through his French tutor’s pretentious veneer. Even though it was precisely at this point that he began to enjoy studying, his already obstinate and headstrong nature made him resent moreover submitting to the authority of a person he did not respect.15 Later on, he would resent submitting to any authority.
The friction in Tolstoy’s relationship with Saint-Thomas may have been caused by an awareness at some level that he possessed a superior intellect, but his mental acuity was not always on show, and certainly not on the day he tried to fly. It was more probably Tolstoyan dikost which impelled him to go up to the classroom on the mezzanine floor one day and take a running jump out of the window. He claimed afterwards that he had wanted to do something unusual and surprise everybody. Since everybody was at table, however, wondering where he was, they remained oblivious – until the mystery of young Lev’s absence was solved by the cook, who had seen him hurtling towards the ground through the kitchen window. As it turned out, Tolstoy was blessed with a strong constitution. He lost consciousness briefly and suffered some concussion, but was fully restored to health after sleeping solidly for eighteen hours.16