1
ANCESTORS: THE TOLSTOYS AND THE VOLKONSKYS
[T]he extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air – all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything – above all the swaying of the birch trees on the avenue – is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.
Letter to Sofya Tolstaya, Yasnaya Polyana, 3 May 18971
‘BY HIS BIRTH, by his upbringing and by his manners, father was a real aristocrat. Despite the worker’s blouse he invariably wore, despite his complete contempt for all the nobility’s prejudices, he was a gentleman, and he remained a gentleman until the end of his days.’2 Thus Tolstoy’s son Ilya summed up perhaps the greatest contradiction in the personality of a man whose whole life was a bundle of contradictions. For most of his life, Tolstoy never questioned his status as a barin (a landowning gentleman), and he was proud of his noble heritage. He continued to behave like an aristocrat long after he dropped his title and started wearing peasant clothes, because it was in his blood. ‘Although he wore the dress of a peasant, he had neither the aspect nor the bearing of a peasant. No muzhik [peasant] ever had his piercing eyes or his air of composure and mastery,’ wrote the economist James Mavor when reflecting on his meeting with the seventy-one-year-old writer in 1899.3 Whether it was someone seeing a weather-beaten peasant walking along a country road and noticing there was something about him which was ‘out of keeping with his garb’, as his American translator Isabel Hapgood commented,4 or the way in which Tolstoy invariably used the polite form of address when speaking to people, something defiantly aristocratic remained about his bearing.
Tolstoy certainly shared his family’s deep reverence for their ancestors. He loved the myths that surrounded them, and the feeling of being connected to them through the generations. According to one Russian Tolstoy specialist, he was even convinced ‘that he existed before he was born, that he was the product of all his ancestors who lived long before him’.5 That sense of being part of a continuum was indeed profoundly important for a writer whose life was so deeply bound up with his country’s history. Tolstoy also loved the fact that he was constantly reminded of his family’s past by the physical environment of Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where he spent the greater part of his life, and which, as his son Lev was to comment, he regarded as ‘an organic part of himself’.6 His beloved home had been in his family for generations, it was where he was born, it was where he spent his early childhood, surrounded by family portraits, furniture and heirlooms, and it was really the only place where he was happy. It was fitting that he himself ultimately became an organic part of Yasnaya Polyana by being buried in the middle of its grounds. ‘It is difficult for me to imagine Russia and my attitude to it without my Yasnaya Polyana’, Tolstoy wrote in 1858, at the beginning of a projected essay about the summer he had spent the previous year on his estate. He explained that without Yasnaya Polyana he might understand certain general laws about Russia, but he would not love it with such a passion, and that this was the only form of love for the motherland that he knew.7
Tolstoy’s cult of his ancestors may have been a badge of pride, and fundamental to his own sense of identity, but it also furnished the inspiration for his great novels. His abiding interest in the generation of the 1825 Decembrist Uprising, for example, which was the inspiration behind War and Peace, was in part fuelled by his being distantly related to Sergey Volkonsky, who had been one of its leaders and a hero of the war with Napoleon. Tolstoy actually met Volkonsky in Florence in 1860. Volkonsky had recently returned from thirty years’ exile in Siberia, having been amnestied by Alexander II and was by then an old man. Once Tolstoy began writing War and Peace three years later, it was his ancestors who became the indispensable prototypes of many of its memorable central characters. For this reason alone it is worth extending our view of Tolstoy’s life back several generations.
Tolstoy was committed to truth in his fiction, but for some reason he never submitted his family history to the razor-edged rational analysis he applied to most other things. Thus he continued to believe into his dotage that his family was descended from a German immigrant called Dick. Amongst the books in his library were four volumes tracing the genealogies of Russia’s most important aristocratic families,8 and Tolstoy believed what he read there – that his earliest ancestor came to Russia in the Middle Ages, and that his surname was simply a translation of dick, which means ‘fat’ in German.9 This is what Tolstoy often told foreign visitors who were curious to know about his family’s history,10 and this is what was reproduced in the earliest biographies of the great writer. Evgeny Solovyov, for example (whose biography went on sale for twenty-five kopecks in 1894, when Tolstoy was sixty-six), explained that tolsty, the Russian word for ‘fat’ (stressed on the first syllable) had given rise to Tolstye – ‘the Tolstoys’. From Tolstye had then come Tolstoy, with a stress on the second syllable.11
There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest this putative German immigrant who founded the Tolstoy dynasty ever existed, nor indeed was it ever accepted practice to translate foreign surnames into Russian in old Muscovy. The Tolstoy family’s belief in its German provenance certainly ran deep, however. In the 1840s, ‘Der Dicke’ was what Nicholas I reputedly called General Count Pyotr Alexandrovich Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Nikolayevich who served as ambassador to Paris in the crucial years before the Napoleonic invasion. Maybe the Tsar was hoping to pay the Tolstoy family a compliment by alluding to its German origins, being himself a Germanophile. But perhaps it was just because the venerable count was rather portly.12
In another family legend it was supposedly a German called Indros who launched the Tolstoy dynasty. According to Russian annals of genealogy dating back to the seventeenth century, this Indros migrated from the Holy Roman Empire with two sons and 3,000 men in 1352, settled in Chernigov, changed his name to Leonty and converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev wondered with good reason, however, how this feudal lord and his enormous retinue could have managed safely to cover hundreds of miles and cross several states usually at war with each other. Why did they attempt such a journey in the first place, and why should they have chosen the politically insignificant Chernigov as their destination? There is also the inconvenient fact that bubonic plague was raging in Rus in the mid-fourteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe, which was hardly an incentive to the pioneering spirit.13 Tolstoy’s grandson Sergey Mikhailovich, who also subscribed to the peculiarly resilient family myth about its German origins, complicated the issue by suggesting Indris was actually a Flemish count called Henri de Mons who set off for Russia after an unsuccessful expedition to Cyprus.14 It does at least seem probable, however, that the Tolstoys could trace their lineage to this fabled progenitor’s great grandson Andrey Kharitonovich, who brought the family to Moscow in the early fifteenth century and whose corpulence earned him the nickname which in time gave rise to the family’s illustrious surname.