Dmitry is a shady figure in Tolstoy’s life – he was the first of the brothers to die, at the age of twenty-nine, and does not appear ever to have been close to his siblings – but he looms large in Tolstoy’s memoirs of their life in Kazan. It was really only in Kazan, in fact, that Tolstoy’s real memories of Dmitry began. unlike his brother Lev, just one year younger than him, who confessed to preening and being conscious of his appearance even before they moved to Kazan, Dmitry never had any aspirations to being comme il faut. With rare exceptions he was serious and quiet, particularly after he started to attend church regularly and observe all the fasts, like Aunt Aline before him. As the youngest, Lev had a tendency to envy all his elder brothers, and what he envied in ‘Mitenka’ was his indifference to other people’s opinions about him, which he believed was a trait inherited from their mother.8 Indeed it was only because of Mitenka’s unkempt appearance that he came to the attention of his far more image-conscious siblings, who were embarrassed by him. Dmitry had no interest in dancing or attending social events, nor did he spend much time with his family, and he stuck rigidly to his student’s uniform. Tolstoy retained a strong memory of Dmitry’s tall, thin frame, his sad, large, brown, almond-shaped eyes, and the nervous tic he developed during his first serious bout of fasting, when he would jerk his head, as if his tie was too tight. Tolstoy would draw heavily on this and other aspects of Dmitry’s life when he came to create the character of Levin’s brother Nikolay in Anna Karenina.
As the grandchildren of the former governor of Kazan, the Tolstoys were invited to all the best households in town, and they thoroughly enjoyed becoming acquainted with the local aristocracy – all except Dmitry, who only ever befriended one poor, bedraggled student who went by the unfortunate name of Poluboyarinov (apart from simply sounding clumsy, the name implies someone who is only ‘half-noble’). Otherwise Dmitry preferred to spend his time in church. Rather than go to the fashionable university church, he went to the one attached to the prison opposite their house, and at Easter probably spent more time there than at home. It is the custom for excerpts from the four Gospels concerning Christ’s Passion to be read out on Good Friday, but this church’s very strict priest unusually insisted on all four Gospels being read out in their entirety. Since the Orthodox Church requires its parishioners to stand for services, the congregation would have been on its feet for a very long time indeed, but this was probably welcomed by Dmitry, who had a tendency to apply himself with almost masochistic zeal to anything he cared passionately about.9
When casting his mind back to his years in Kazan, Tolstoy readily acknowledged that he and his siblings were far too ‘obtuse’ to appreciate the unusual moral purity of their brother as adolescents. Like their fashionable friends in Kazan, they instead ‘continually subjected him to ridicule’, as Tolstoy recounts in Confession, even nicknaming him Noah.10 Dmitry’s remarkable altruism was perhaps best observed in his relationship with Lyubov Sergeyevna, the illegitimate child taken in at some point by the Tolstoy family out of pity. In Kazan, Lyubov Sergeyevna was taken in by Aunt Polina, and Tolstoy’s memories of her date from this time. They were not very affectionate memories. Lyubov Sergeyevna was a ‘strange and pathetic creature’, he later recorded, who suffered from some ailment which made her face puff up as if stung by bees. During the summer months she was insensitive to the numerous flies that settled on her face, which made her even more unpleasant to look at. In Tolstoy’s recollection she had only a few strands of black hair and no eyebrows, and found it physically difficult to speak, probably as a result of a tumour. He also recalled that she also always smelled bad, and lived in a suffocating and equally malodorous room whose windows were never opened. When Tolstoy became aware of Lyubov Sergeyevna she was ‘not only pitiful but repellent’, and most of the family did little to conceal their feelings of revulsion. Dmitry, however, went out of his way to listen and talk to her, and become her friend, not giving the slightest sign that he regarded what he was doing as philanthropy. Impervious to his family’s opinion of him, he just did what he thought right. Nor was his selfless behaviour a fad. He remained close to Lyubov Sergeyevna until her death in August 1844, when he completed his first year at university.11
Like their father, Dmitry was artistically gifted. When playing games many years earlier, Nikolay had promised his younger brothers that their wishes would be fulfilled if they carried out all the conditions he imposed on them. It was characteristic that Sergey declared his desire to mould horses and chickens out of wax, while Dmitry wanted to draw big pictures like an artist: the Tolstoy museum in Moscow stores in its archive many pencil drawings he executed of rural landscapes which are impressive for a ten-year-old.12 (Lev, meanwhile, could think of nothing he wanted back then except the ability to draw small pictures.)
There are no biographical events at all listed for 1842 and 1843 in the official chronicle of Tolstoy’s life and works. Careful sleuthing, however, has established that after Tolstoy turned fourteen in August 1842 his brothers Nikolay and Sergey took him for the first time to a brothel. Many, many years later, his wife castigated him for writing a seduction scene in his last novel Resurrection, believing that as an old man (he was then seventy) he ought to be ashamed of writing such ‘filth’. This unpleasant altercation induced Tolstoy to confess to a friend that after committing the ‘act’ for the first time that fateful day in Kazan, he had stood by the woman’s bed and wept. And he was deeply shaken when an acquaintance later told him that he had once been a novice at the Monastery of the Cyzicus Martyrs, located on the outskirts of Kazan. Tolstoy responded quietly that it had been in that part of town that he had had his ‘first fall’.13 Perhaps his feeling of guilt was heightened by his awareness that his grandfather was buried in the monastery’s cemetery along with other dignitaries (the only grave from that period that has survived to the present day).
Tolstoy later regretted the absence of moral guidance in his early teenage years in Kazan. On 1 January 1900 he confided to his diary that he had done a lot of bad things when he was young out of a desire to copy his elders, who drank, smoked and led debauched lives.14 Dmitry, of course, whom their brother Nikolay characterised as an extreme ‘eccentric’, was not included in their number: he practised complete abstention until the age of twenty-five, which in those days, according to Tolstoy, was a great rarity, particularly as far as relations with women were concerned.15 This was certainly not true of Sergey, however, who was Dmitry’s polar opposite, and a major influence on their youngest brother Lev’s waywardness. Of all the brothers, Sergey was the most talented and good-looking, and if Tolstoy loved and ‘respected’ Nikolay, and was on ‘comradely’ terms with Dmitry, he ‘admired and copied’ Sergey. Indeed, as he famously puts it at one point in his memoirs, he actually ‘wanted to be him’.16 Sergey had a reputation for being gregarious and good-humoured, and for singing continually. Where Tolstoy was painfully shy and acutely self-conscious, which interfered with his enjoyment of life, Sergey was an extrovert whose egotism made him supremely oblivious of whether his behaviour and appearance aroused approval or disapproval. For this reason he was all the more attractive to his younger brother, for whom he was a mysterious and unfathomable exotic species. Tolstoy started copying Sergey in early childhood, first by rearing different kinds of speckled and tufted hens and painting pictures of them.17 During his adolescence in Kazan, it was Sergey who led Tolstoy into debauchery.18