Just before the first anniversary of Nikolay Ilyich’s death in May 1838, babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna died after a long and painful illness. She was seventy-six. This death Tolstoy experienced fully, as he had to endure being taken with his siblings to kiss the lifeless white hand that lay on top of the mound of white linen on their grandmother’s high bed, and say goodbye to her before she breathed her last. He also had to confront the sight of her stern, hook-nosed face in the open coffin lying on the table before she was taken off to be buried, and put on a newly sewn black mourning jacket.17 Unable to contemplate any change to her formerly grand aristocratic lifestyle, Grandmother Pelageya had insisted on maintaining the family’s highly ritualised and formal dining habits after her son’s death, but now everything fell apart. Even the impractical Aunt Aline could see that the sums did not add up. After subtracting the money needed to pay various wages, bribes and dues, the income from the family’s five estates barely covered the rental of their Moscow house and the salaries of all the tutors who had been engaged, let alone any of their other expenses.
Some drastic decisions had to be taken, which resulted in the family being split up, with Aline remaining in Moscow with Saint-Thomas, her ward Pashenka and the two eldest boys. They now moved to a smaller and much cheaper flat, but were glad to leave behind the big house ‘which had seen so many tears’. The two youngest boys, their sister Masha and Dunechka accompanied Aunt Toinette and Fyodor Ivanovich back to Yasnaya Polyana.18
One casualty of the downsizing was the Tolstoys’ faithful coachman Mitka Kopylov, whom the family could no longer afford to keep on. His strength and agility, combined with his diminutive size, had also made him an irreplaceable and valued postilion, and the rewards for his good service and his pride in his work were reflected in the silk shirts and velvet coats he wore. There were plenty of Moscow merchants ready to give such a smartly turned-out coachman a wage, but when Mitka’s brother was conscripted into the army due to the quota system that was in operation, he was forced to go back to work as a labourer at Yasnaya Polyana. Conscription always represented a major loss for peasant families, even after the term of service was reduced to twenty years, as soldiers in the infantry were not able to return home while serving. It was particularly difficult in this case. Mitka’s elderly father now needed his other son to come back and work in the fields, and within a few months the debonair new Muscovite had gone back to being a drably dressed peasant in bast shoes. As a serf, he had no choice, and Tolstoy later explained that Mitka’s quiet acceptance of his lot, and the uncomplaining way he surrendered a job he loved for heavy agricultural work, were highly influential on his nascent feelings of affection and respect for the Russian peasantry.19
Although he had partly enjoyed the experience of living in Moscow, and the chance to make new friends, Tolstoy must have been relieved to escape from his tutor and go back home to Yasnaya Polyana after his grandmother’s death. He and Dmitry were now able to go and visit the new estate at Pirogovo, which had a fine stud farm, and they each received their own pony. It would be two years before the brothers were all reunited at Yasnaya Polyana, but in the meantime they started writing to each other. At this stage their correspondence was not terribly exciting. A week after Dmitry and Lev left Moscow, Sergey wrote to tell them that all was well in their new home, and that the cactus was about to start flowering. Lev wrote back to tell Sergey and Nikolay about his new pony. Sometimes Nikolay wrote, sometimes the letters were in French, and sometimes the elder brothers deigned to include their sister Masha as an addressee.20 Occasionally Dunechka also got a mention in their letters, but she left the family in March 1839 to go to a boarding school in Moscow, and Tolstoy now became closer to Masha for the first time as a result.21
In August 1839 the cadet branch of the family enjoyed a leisurely journey back to Moscow for a visit. Since they were travelling in the summer months, and since Tolstoy was now eleven, and curious about everything, it was a great adventure for him. Most exciting of all, however, was the prospect of seeing the Tsar lay the cornerstone of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This was the Cathedral Alexander I had pledged to build back in 1812 when Napoleon retreated from Moscow, ‘to preserve the eternal memory of that unprecedented zeal, loyalty for the Faith and the Fatherland with which the Russian people exalted itself in these difficult days, and to mark Our gratitude to God’s Providence, by saving Russia from the ruin threatening her’.22 Five years after Napoleon had been driven from Moscow, the cornerstone had been laid in 1817 at a magnificent ceremony attended by 400 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy, 50,000 guards officers, the Tsar and his family and hundreds of thousands of their loyal subjects. But despite the injection of 16 million roubles from the state treasury, and the labour of some 20,000 serfs specially drafted in for the purpose, construction had not gone according to plan. Officially it came to a halt because the foundations were insufficiently secure. In reality, the money was embezzled, creating a huge scandal whose duration was long enough to provide inspiration for Gogol’s classic play about Russian corruption, The Government Inspector, in 1836.23
After becoming tsar in 1825, Nicholas moved the cathedral’s location from the Sparrow Hills, the highest point in Moscow, to a site by the river nearer to the Kremlin. He also exchanged the original neoclassical blueprint for a new Russian-Byzantine design modelled on Justinian’s Cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople, which was much more in keeping with his tastes, not to mention his vision of the Russian Empire. Nicholas I’s arrival in Moscow to lay the new cornerstone of the cathedral in September 1839 was a national event, and the Tolstoys were there to witness it. As friends of Alexey Milyutin, who headed the Commission for the Construction of the Cathedral, they were able to watch the ceremony from the windows of his house, which looked out right on to the site. They thus had a thrilling bird’s-eye view not only of the Tsar, but of the elite Preobrazhensky Guards in their formal dress uniforms, who had travelled specially from St Petersburg along with Nicholas I to take part in the military parades.24 After a special liturgy in the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, the Tsar led a procession on foot to the building site, followed by veterans of 1812, church dignitaries, twenty infantry battalions and six cavalry troops, accompanied by constant cannon fire and the ringing of the bells in all of Moscow’s churches. Thus was the great victory over Napoleon celebrated again.25
A quarter of a century later, the construction of the enormous cathedral’s exterior would be complete, and Tolstoy would be hard at work writing the vast novel which would commemorate the events of 1812, his patriotic feelings still intact. But he had no desire to be anywhere near the cathedral when it was finally consecrated amidst great pomp in May 1883, after the completion of its sumptuous interior decoration. Indeed, he was hundreds of miles away drinking fermented mare’s milk (koumiss) on his farm in the steppe, having by this time renounced his Orthodox faith, his fiction and any lingering patriotic feelings. He had, however, been casting his mind back to that visit to Moscow in 1839 at that time, for he was eleven years old when he consciously began to question his faith. On the first page of his Confession, which he tried to publish in 1882, he describes how excited he and his brothers had been when Alexey Milyutin’s son Vladimir came to see them one day that autumn and told them of his discovery that there was no God.26 Along with the pain of being locked up by his French tutor, this event was also etched deeply into Tolstoy’s memory.