In 1886, as part of his mission to provide the masses with high-quality reading matter, Tolstoy reworked the story for a popular weekly journal. It is a typically subversive work, in keeping with the ideas he had begun to develop at the time. The story is about the events which take place during a journey to the monastery on one of the boats ferrying pilgrims to the islands from Arkhangelsk. A bishop asks to be set down on an island inhabited by three legendary ‘holy men’ whom he wants to meet. To his consternation, their modest, unconventional and practical Christianity proves to contain more holiness than the ‘official’ Church dogma he tries to inculcate them with. The bishop is humbled by his meeting with the Three Elders. Such provocative ideas caused Tolstoy to become the Russian government’s greatest threat. He was so determined to expose the lies and hypocrisy he saw embedded in the fabric of the tsarist system that he positively hoped he could emulate his ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich, but the government refused to allow him to become a martyr. Alexander III once famously remarked, ‘Tolstoy wants me to exile him to Solovki, but I am not going to give him the publicity.’19 After the 1917 Revolution Solovki became one of the Soviet Union’s most notorious concentration camps, and it is grimly ironic that some of Tolstoy’s followers ended up there in 1930 simply for refusing to give up their beliefs about non-resistance to violence and the abolition of private property.20
Fourteen children were born to Tolstoy and his wife Sonya during their long marriage, but Lev Nikolayevich was not the first Tolstoy to have so many offspring. Pyotr Andreyevich’s eldest son Ivan had five sons and five daughters before he died in the Solovetsky prison at the age of forty-three in 1728, and the second son was Andrey Ivanovich (1721–1803). This was Tolstoy’s great-grandfather, about whom not much is known beyond the fact that he was christened ‘Big Nest’ because he had twenty-three children, twelve of whom reached adulthood.21 Tolstoy’s aunt once told him that Andrey Ivanovich had married at such a young age that he apparently burst into tears when his equally young wife Alexandra went to a ball one evening without saying goodbye to him.22
In 1741 Catherine I’s daughter Elizabeth finally became Empress, as Pyotr Andreyevich had hoped, and at some point in her reign, she returned one of the Tolstoy family estates to his son Ivan Petrovich’s widow. In 1760 the remaining properties and Pyotr Andreyevich’s title were finally restored.23 It would have been at this time that the Tolstoy family crest was designed, consisting of a shield supported by two borzoi dogs, signifying loyalty and swiftness in attaining results. The shield, divided into seven segments, features at its centre a crossed gold sword and a silver arrow running through a golden key, as a symbol of the family’s long history. In the top left-hand corner is half of the Russian imperial eagle, and next to it on a silver background is the blue St Andrew Cross which Pyotr Andreyevich was awarded in 1722. In the bottom right-hand corner the seven towers topped with crescents recall Pyotr Andreyevich’s incarceration in Constantinople’s Yedikule Fortress, and his role in securing Russian victory over the Turks.24
Count Andrey Ivanovich Tolstoy, as he now became at the age of thirty-nine, was a loyal servant of the state. He was also clearly fiscally astute, as by the time of his death in 1803 the family’s fortunes had begun to improve. The profligate and sybaritic ways of Tolstoy’s grandfather, Ilya Andreyevich (1757–1820), however, ensured the family was soon impecunious again. Ilya Andreyevich followed the conventional career path at this time for Russian noblemen, who were still required to serve: he went into the army. After retiring in his thirties, he got married, and he married welclass="underline" he and his wife Pelageya Nikolayevna (1762–1838) had at their disposal not only a Moscow mansion, but also extensive properties in Tula province. They chose to make their home in their 5,500-acre Polyany estate, which came with hundreds of serfs, an aviary and orchards. The couple lived in some style: the sterlet served at their table came fresh from the White Sea via Arkhangelsk, the oysters were imported from Holland, while asparagus and pineapples were grown in the huge greenhouses they built on their lands. According to one family legend, the count even despatched his linen to Amsterdam to be laundered. Tolstoy describes their life as one long succession of ‘parties, theatres, balls, dinners, excursions’.25
Ilya Andreyevich was hospitable and generous, but not terribly well educated: when he parted from his wife for the first time in twenty years in 1813, he wrote her a letter riddled with spelling mistakes, and almost totally lacking in punctuation. A brief extract might be rendered in English thus: ‘Sadd very sadd my dear friend Countess Pelageya Nikolayevna to congratulate you on your absent name-day for the first time in my life but whatcanbe done friend of my heart but necesery to submit to reason.’26 Pelageya, for her part, spoke better French than Russian, and that was the limit of her education according to her grandson, who bucked the family tradition by acquiring 22,000 volumes for his personal library.27
Throughout his writing career, Tolstoy pillaged his family history for creative material to use in developing his fictional characters, and it is not hard to see shades of Ilya Andreyevich and Pelageya Nikolayevna behind the august figures of Count and Countess Rostov in War and Peace. Tolstoy actually named his grandfather in his early drafts, referring to him as ‘kind and stupid’. His subsequent notes for the character of Count Ilya Rostov also correspond very closely to Ilya Andreyevich, who was also a stalwart of the English Club in Moscow. Tolstoy’s account of the lavish dinner Count Rostov hosts there in War and Peace is based on sources describing the dinner for 300 which Ilya Andreyevich hosted in 1806 in honour of Bagration’s defeat of Napoleon at Schöngraben. Ilya Andreyevich was certainly somewhat larger than life. As Tolstoy has recorded, his penchant for placing large bets at games of whist and ombre without being actually able to play, his readiness to give money to anyone who asked him for a loan, and his extravagant lifestyle eventually led to him becoming mired in debt, and in 1815 he was forced to take a job.
The card-playing, and consequently the debts, continued during the five undistinguished years that Ilya Andreyevich served as governor of Kazan, and a succession of poor business deals further increased his debt to 500,000 roubles by 1819. In February 1820 he was dismissed from his post on charges of corruption (which were probably trumped-up – it seems to have been his wife who secretly took bribes). Ilya Andreyevich never recovered from this blow, and he died within the month. Tolstoy inherited his grandfather’s gambling habit, and his habit of staking and losing large sums, but he was fortunately able to curb both by the time he got married.
Tolstoy’s father, Nikolay Ilyich, born in 1794, was the eldest of Ilya Andreyevich’s and Pelageya Nikolayevna’s four sons, and very different. When surveying his dismal financial prospects, Ilya Andreyevich realised his son would probably have to work for his living, and so he enrolled Nikolay in the civil service when he was six years old. This meant that when he reached sixteen, he automatically received the rank of collegiate registrar, which placed him on the bottom rung of the civil service ladder. In keeping with his kindly character, Ilya Andreyevich did not beat his children, which was highly unusual, as even the children of the imperial family were subject to corporal punishment at this time. Otherwise, Tolstoy’s father had a fairly conventional upbringing for a Russian nobleman in early nineteeth-century Russia. When he was fifteen his aunt gave him Afanasy Petrov to be his personal servant, and the following year his parents gave him a peasant girl for his ‘health’, as it was euphemistically put at the time. This resulted in the birth of Mishenka, Tolstoy’s illegitimate brother, who was trained to work in the postal service, but later apparently ‘lost his way’. Tolstoy later found it disconcerting to encounter this poverty-stricken elder brother who was more like their father than any of them.28 He too would later have an illegitimate son, whom his children felt resembled him more closely than they did.