Tolstoy

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 well: 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.