The early nineteenth century was the golden age of the Russian country estate, and Nikolay Volkonsky was not alone in wanting to retreat from the official world associated with St Petersburg and the court, and go back to nature. Russian aristocrats had been rediscovering their roots ever since the 1760s, when the nobility began to be progressively freed from the compulsory state service that Peter the Great had introduced in order to drive through his ambitious programme of reform and Europeanisation. With vast swathes of property now in private hands, manor houses began springing up all over the Russian countryside, some of them grand classical mansions, others more humble wooden affairs. The house in which Tolstoy was born was somewhere between the two. The Yasnaya Polyana estate was not quite a tabula rasa when Nikolay Volkonsky took up permanent residence there. In the early eighteenth century, guided by the vogue for straight lines and geometrical precision which characterised the new city of St Petersburg, previous owners had established the main part of the estate in its northeastern corner, and had constructed two rows of wooden dwellings and a formal garden with lime trees. They had also built a long straight avenue leading from the main house to the entrance of the property, near the main road to Tula.
Volkonsky had grand plans for Yasnaya Polyana, but he needed to find a good architect first, and principal construction work began only after 1810. He decided the main manor house should be at the highest point of the property, facing the south-east. It would be flanked by two identical, two-storey wings, each containing ten rooms. These were built first, with wooden decking leading to the main house. Only the first floor of the manor house was completed in Volkonsky’s lifetime. The second storey, which was built in wood to save costs, was added by Tolstoy’s father in 1824. It was a house in the classical empire style so beloved in Russia in the early nineteenth century, with thirty-two rooms and a façade graced by an eight-column central portico.
Over time, another nineteen buildings appeared in the grounds, a few of which were built in brick, such as the ice house and a threshing barn, but most in wood. They joined a classically proportioned building already standing, which had been used to house a small carpet factory. Later it accommodated the family’s servants, and became known as the ‘Volkonsky House’. Nikolay Sergeyevich was kept busy. Apart from the main family house he built stables, a coach-house, further living quarters for the servants, a bath-house and a summer-house. He also built two orangeries, linked by a gallery, in which to grow exotic fruits for his table such as melons and peaches. This gallery (which burned down in 1867) was a favourite haunt for Tolstoy when he was growing up. To judge from an evocative passage in his early work Youth, on summer nights he liked to come and sleep in the gallery, from where he could see the lights in the main house gradually being extinguished, listen to the sounds of the night and feel he was part of nature.
Nikolay Sergeyevich seems to have had a finely tuned aesthetic sense. Tolstoy records proudly in his memoirs that what he built was not ‘only solid and comfortable but extremely elegant’.32 Volkonsky also brought his taste and discernment to bear on the landscaping of the property. First of all he built a ha-ha running round its perimeter, then some iron gates at the front entrance positioned between two large round white towers.33 These were hollow so that the watchman could seek shelter during inclement weather. Then, as now, the gates opened on to an avenue lined with birch trees leading up to the manor house, which was wide enough for a troika or a coach and four. This was the famous ‘Preshpekt’, and a similar driveway is mentioned in War and Peace in the description of the Bolkonsky estate Bald Hills, which bears many similarities to Yasnaya Polyana.
Volkonsky laid a lawn in front of the main house, which he edged with two tree-lined paths running parallel to the main avenue, but he kept the French-style miniature park of pollarded lime trees. The paths traversing it in what Tolstoy called a ‘square and star’ formation created the wedges which gave the park its name. Soon the natural song of nightingales and orioles who liked to cluster in the branches of the park’s densely planted trees was augmented by music performed by Volkonsky’s serfs, who had been specially trained for the purpose. According to Tolstoy, Volkonsky loathed hunting, but he loved plants, flowers and music, and kept a small orchestra for his and his daughter’s entertainment. By the standards of someone like Prince Sheremetev, who maintained a company of singers, dancers and musicians, and staged full-scale theatrical performances of the latest French operas, or Prince Naryshkin, who had enough serfs to play in a forty-piece horn band, with each playing only one note, Volkonsky’s artistic ambitions were quite modest. It was nevertheless common for Russian landowners to train their more talented serfs to perform for them.34 One day, long after his grandfather’s death, Tolstoy found some wooden benches and stands arranged round an enormous elm tree in the park: this was where Volkonsky liked to stroll in the early morning to the accompaniment of music en plein air. As soon as the prince left the park, the orchestra would fall silent, and the musicians would go back to their normal duties digging the garden or feeding the pigs. In one of the drafts for War and Peace Tolstoy describes eight bewigged serfs in jackets and stockings standing on the gravel in the middle of the park, surrounded by lilac and rose bushes, tuning their instruments at seven in the morning, ready to burst into a Haydn symphony the minute they receive word that their master is awake.
As the nineteenth century wore on, the passion amongst aristocratic Russian landowners for the regularity of formal gardens in the style of Louis XIV was superseded by an enthusiasm for more ‘natural’ English landscaping. Nikolay Sergeyevich shared this enthusiasm. His next project was to create a much wilder ‘English park’ from the sloping contours of the lower part of the estate by the entrance towers. Volkonsky also created a cascade of ponds, whose banks were planted with rose bushes. Tolstoy enjoyed walking in this part of Yasnaya Polyana because it was where his mother most liked to spend her time. It was in her memory in 1898 that he restored the little gazebo on stilts from where she used to watch the traffic passing on the road outside. Later on, she would sit there waiting for her husband to come home. It was Maria Volkonskaya who planted the silver poplars round the edge of the Middle Pond, and the shrubs and fir trees lower down. On the other side of the entrance towers was the Big Pond, half of which was traditionally given over for use by the local peasants.
One thing missing from the traditional estate ensemble at Yasnaya Polyana was a church. Possibly this was because Nikolay Sergeyevich believed his family could rely on the church down the road, where his ashes were transferred in 1928. As a student of Voltaire, however, and a child of his time, it is more likely that he simply had no interest in building a church. This did not prevent him having dozens of theological books in his library, not to mention a twenty-volume edition of the Bible and accompanying exegesis. They sat next to works by Racine, Virgil, Montaigne, Rousseau, Homer, Plutarch and Vasari, to mention just some of the authors collected by Nikolay Sergeyevich. There were also plenty of books which he bought for the education of his daughter.35