In 1682, when the old feudal hierarchical system was abolished, Russian noble families rushed to register their genealogy with the state in order to legitimise their claim to noble status. Another fact which casts doubt on the theory that the Tolstoys were descended from German immigrants is that nearly all the families who registered their genealogy claimed foreign ancestry (most of which was completely spurious), in the hope of enhancing their position, and also their standing with the Tsar.15 One of the six signatories who submitted the Tolstoys’ early family history to the Russian heraldry office in Moscow in 1686 was the court servant Pyotr Andreyevich, who a few decades later would become the first Count Tolstoy. Pyotr Andreyevich was an exceptional individual, and the first Tolstoy to enter the history books, and he clearly also had creative talent, as he probably invented the story about his earliest ancestors, in which case the family talent for writing fiction can also be traced back several centuries.
Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645–1729) led a remarkable life. A man of immense energy, with a brilliant mind, he was also known to be treacherous, switching his political allegiance to the young Peter the Great soon after the latter wrested power from his half-sister Sofia in 1689. Pyotr Andreyevich played his cards skilfully. By 1697, at the age of fifty-two, and already a grandfather, he had demonstrated sufficient loyalty to be sent by Tsar Peter to Italy to study navigation and ship-building, along with many other scions of noble families. One of them was his near contemporary Boris Petrovich Sheremetev, who was rather higher up on the social ladder and travelled with an enormous retinue, including a scribe. Pyotr Tolstoy, by contrast, was accompanied by one soldier and one servant, and he wrote his own diary, which provides a far more interesting and informative account of Italian life seen through Russian eyes.
During his year and four months away, Pyotr Andreyevich travelled the length and breadth of Italy from Venice to Bari, and was able to study Italian life and social customs in some detail. Since he had come from ‘Holy Mother Moscow’, where secular culture was thin on the ground, it is not surprising to find a great deal of attention in his diary devoted to the Church. Pyotr Andreyevich came back to Moscow erudite and beardless, however, and the sight of a Russian Orthodox Christian without a beard probably shocked many of his contemporaries (the foundation of St Petersburg was still a few years off). Pyotr Tolstoy was one of the first Russians to don Western dress in the last years of old Muscovy. Years before Peter the Great began the wholesale import of Western culture into Russia, he could boast an impressive knowledge of European letters, as well as exquisite manners.16
In 1701, seeing his brilliant diplomatic potential, Peter appointed Pyotr Andreyevich as Russia’s first ambassador to Constantinople. It was a tall order to hope to improve relations with the Sublime Porte, which fought three wars against Russia during the reign of Peter the Great alone, and Pyotr Tolstoy spent the last years of his posting languishing in the Yedikule (‘Seven Towers’) Fortress – the dungeon where foreign ambassadors whose countries were at war with the Ottoman Empire were traditionally incarcerated. But Tolstoy was clearly a restless man who needed to be engaged on something. Either before or after Sultan Ahmed III declared war in 1710, he drew on the knowledge of Latin he had acquired during his time in Italy to produce the first Russian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
By the time Pyotr Tolstoy returned to Russia in 1714, Peter the Great had not only founded St Petersburg, but made it his new capital. Tolstoy accompanied the Tsar on further foreign trips, and then in 1717 was entrusted with the most delicate and challenging of missions. He was to go to Naples and persuade Peter’s errant son Alexey, the heir to the throne, to return to Russia. Hostile to his father’s reforms, Alexey had sought refuge in Vienna with his brother-in-law Emperor Charles VI, who stationed him out of harm’s way in Naples in order to avert a diplomatic crisis. Pyotr Andreyevich had to resort to nefarious means, employing guile and cunning, and a great deal of disinformation, but his mission was successful. Upon his return to Russia the tsarevich Alexey was immediately thrown into the dungeon of the St Peter and Paul Fortress and interrogated for treason; he died soon afterwards.
Pyotr Tolstoy also took part in the interrogation. He did not endear himself to the Russian population at large, but was showered with riches by the grateful Tsar, who decorated him, appointed him senator and gave him extensive lands. By the time he was made a count, on the day of the coronation of Peter’s wife Catherine I as Empress in 1724, the year before the Tsar’s death, Pyotr Andreyevich was one of the most powerful men in Russia. But his machinations to ensure that Catherine’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded her were to be his undoing. Following Catherine’s death in 1727, Tolstoy’s rival Menshikov had him arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the age of eighty-two, Pyotr Andreyevich was sentenced to death and summarily shorn of his title, his decorations and his lands. Shortly before his execution, Tolstoy’s sentence was commuted to life exile in the Solovetsky Monastery prison, which was located on an island near the Arctic Circle. It was a month’s journey away, and he was escorted there, as befitted his rank, by some 100 soldiers, first by land up to the port of Arkhangelsk, and then across the freezing waters of the White Sea. Here Tolstoy was kept in solitary confinement, forbidden to engage in correspondence, and only allowed out, in irons, to attend church services.
The Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea had been founded in the fifteenth century by two Stakhanovite monks who regarded life in a normal cloister too easy an option. They had sought instead a life of the utmost physical privation in emulation of the desert ascetics of early Christianity and found it on ‘Solovki’, the remote Solovetsky islands, where there is no daylight in deepest winter. The piety of the monastery’s founding forefathers stood in stark contrast to the barbarity of Ivan the Terrible, who saw nothing untoward in establishing a prison in its sacred grounds. With its harsh climate, it was a particularly bleak place to serve a sentence. Pyotr Andreyevich’s son Ivan, who accompanied him into exile, died the year after they arrived. Within eight months, Pyotr Andreyevich was also dead.
A century and a half later, in the 1870s, their descendant Lev Tolstoy became fascinated by this chapter of his family history while planning a novel set in the times of Peter the Great. Writing to his friend and relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in June 1879, when he was making notes on the case in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Justice, he declared that the exile of Pyotr and Ivan was the ‘darkest episode’ in the lives of their ancestors. For him, the time of Peter the Great was the ‘beginning of everything’, and he became so interested in Pyotr Andreyevich’s fate that he thought seriously for a while about visiting his place of exile that summer, in the hope of finding out more about him.17 By this time the monastery had become one of the most sacred places in Russia (and was attracting around 20,000 pilgrims each year),18 but in the 1870s it was still not an easy place to get to. Tolstoy heard more about Solovki at this time from a peasant storyteller from northern Russia who shared with him the popular legend of the Three Elders.