Other memories from this period of Tolstoy’s childhood are few and far between, but the isolated incidents recalled in his memoirs for that reason resonate all the more. It was only after his father’s death, for example, that the young Tolstoy was brought face to face with the corporal punishment that was occasionally practised at Yasnaya Polyana, where the regime was generally far more humane than on other noble estates. One day, as they returned with their tutor from a walk and were walking past the threshing barn, the children encountered Andrey Ilyin, the overweight steward of the estate, followed by the family’s assistant coachman Kuzma, whose mournful expression astonished them. Upon enquiring where they were going, Andrey calmly replied that he was taking Kuzma to the threshing barn to flog him. ‘I cannot describe the terrible feeling these words and the sight of the kind and dejected Kuzma produced in me,’ Tolstoy wrote in his memoirs, pointing out that Kuzma by this time was a married man, and no longer young. When that evening he told Aunt Toinette about it, she reproached the children angrily for not stopping Andrey, although they clearly did not realise they had the power to intervene. Toinette loathed corporal punishment, and she not only would not countenance the Tolstoy children receiving it, but she did her best to prevent it being meted out to the serfs whenever she could.27 Tolstoy would later also recall this incident in an incendiary article he wrote in 1895 entitled ‘Shameful’, in which he railed about peasants having to submit to humiliating corporal punishment for any small misdemeanour.28
Tolstoy never forgot the time his French governor threatened to thrash him, but the rancour he felt towards him evaporated, particularly when Saint-Thomas wrote him a congratulatory and encouraging letter about a touching poem of gratitude he had written on the occasion of his aunt Aline’s name-day in January 1840, when all the Tolstoys gathered at Yasnaya Polyana. The family were so taken with it that Aunt Aline took a fair copy back to Moscow to show Saint-Thomas, who clearly was not so much of a martinet that he could not recognise signs of talent.29 That summer, friendly relations were established on a firmer footing when Saint-Thomas visited Yasnaya Polyana for the first time, and went hunting with the Tolstoy boys. His verdict on Lev was that he was ‘un petit Molière’.30
Lev meanwhile continued to resist having to learn lessons by rote, whether from the seminarian engaged to teach the younger boys at Yasnaya Polyana, or from old Fyodor Ivanovich Rössel, who was dismissed for drunkenness in 1840.31 Adam Fyodorovich Meyer, the German who replaced him, proved to be even worse, and in the end Fyodor Ivanovich was allowed to return to Yasnaya Polyana, where he remained, living on as a pensioner until the middle of the 1840s. Tolstoy may not have been the most diligent pupil, and that situation did not change during his adolescence, but he clearly enjoyed reading, which did not involve submitting to any kind of coercive authority. Many years later, when he was in his sixties, Tolstoy revealed the books that had made the most impression on him as a small boy.32 First of all there were the books which made a ‘great’ impression on him: A Thousand and One Nights, some of whose tales he had heard from his grandmother’s blind storyteller, and Pushkin’s 1821 poem ‘Napoleon’, which sparked off an interest that would later produce spectacular literary results. Then there was Anton Pogorelsky’s story ‘The Black Hen or The Underground Residents’, which made a ‘very great’ impression on Tolstoy, perhaps partly because when he was a very young boy he kept hens and chicks himself.33
Written in 1829 for the author’s twelve-year-old nephew Alyosha Tolstoy (a distant cousin who was later to become a distinguished writer himself),34 it is about a young boy (also named Alyosha), who saves a favourite hen from being served up for dinner one day. The hen, it turns out, is also a minister in a secret underground kingdom of miniature people, whose king rewards Alyosha with a magic kernel of corn enabling him to come top of the class without studying. One day, however, things start to go wrong, and Alyosha loses his magic powers, only to rediscover the importance of hard work and humility. Along with fantasy, this classic story incorporates certain biographical details, and was the first work for and about children in Russian literature. Admittedly, Pogorelsky (1787–1836) was a minor writer, and this story was written for children; all the same, the common view that Tolstoy’s first published work, his autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, was the first work in Russian literature to have a child as the central character is not quite accurate.35 Tolstoy himself clearly never forgot ‘The Black Hen’, and later in his life he himself turned to writing simple stories for a popular audience, also combining a degree of fantasy with a moral. Since there was still very little children’s literature available when he became an adult, particularly for peasant children, he also sought to fill this gap; the 629 works he produced during his lifetime comprise tales, fables, legends and sketches.
The works which Tolstoy recorded in 1891 as having made an ‘enormous’ impression on him as a child were the story of Joseph from the Bible, Russian fairy tales, and the popular folk epics (byliny) about the semi-historical, legendary heroes (bogatyrs) of old Rus. Tolstoy mentions three names in particular: the Kievan boyar Dobrinya Nikitich, a diplomat and dragon slayer; the priest’s son Alyosha Popovich, who uses cunning to outwit his enemies; and Ilya of Murom, the greatest hero of them all, who is still the most powerful literary personification of the Russian people. Ilya of Murom is a peas-ant’s son, who lies at home on the brick stove until he is thirty-three years old, apparently unable to move. After some wandering beggars give him strength, he then sets out on his horse to perform mighty feats, defeating whole armies single-handedly, and always drawing his super-human power from the Russian land. Ilya of Murom was a warrior who combined strength with meekness, patience and stamina, not wanting to kill, but passionate about defending his nation. The only bogatyr ever made into an Orthodox saint, and an ascetic who refuses to marry, Ilya of Murom has always also been a symbol of spiritual power.36
The only Russian who ever came close to bearing comparison with the mighty Ilya of Murom was Tolstoy, who was just as devoted to his native land, and was similarly identified with it by Russians and foreigners alike (‘when you read Tolstoy’s works, it is impossible not to feel the Russian soul in them’ is a familiar refrain).37 Tolstoy was thirty-five when he found his feet, as it were, and began writing War and Peace, his own epic, one of the longest and greatest works of fiction ever written (which he never regarded as a novel in the conventional sense). He was renowned for his physical strength and stamina, spending long periods in the saddle and fighting with bravery while serving with the Russian army. He had enormous wealth and a huge family, and was later to give it all up to live humbly and work on behalf of the peasantry, fighting against injustices of every kind and becoming the most influential spiritual leader in Russia, even proclaiming chastity. He was frequently portrayed in cartoons as a giant amongst the pygmies of contemporary Russian literature, or towering physically over his fellow writers, with one cartoonist actually portraying him as Ilya of Murom astride his mighty steed in a parody of Vasnetsov’s famous 1898 painting of the three bogatyrs (with Korolenko as Dobrinya Nikitich and Chekhov as Alyosha Popovich).38 It is not surprising, then, that many visitors making the pilgrimage to visit the great sage of Yasnaya Polyana, and expecting to encounter a giant, were disconcerted to discover that Tolstoy was actually quite small.39