Tolstoy

In order to accommodate their burgeoning family, as well as the foreign tutors, the Tolstoys were soon obliged to build a large new extension on to their house. They had built the first extension back in the summer of 1866, and at the end of 1871 they created a large new drawing room and dining room upstairs, and a study for Tolstoy downstairs, with a spacious wooden veranda outside for summer repasts.⁹⁸ The additions destroyed the symmetry of the two identical wings that had once flanked the manor house Tolstoy had sold to pay his gambling debts, but provided much-needed extra room. The second and final extension was completed in December 1871, and was ready for Christmas, which was always one of the most joyous times of year for the Tolstoy children. As well as supervising the scrubbing of floors and the hanging of pictures after all the painting and decorating was finished, Sonya retrieved from storage antique candelabras and old family tableware, as well as sewing masquerade costumes and gilding walnuts in preparation for the arrival of the family’s guests just before midnight on Christmas Eve in three sleighs. More guests arrived the following day, and after the tree had been decorated there was ice-skating and tobogganing, with everyone collapsing of fits of laughter when they took a tumble or landed in a snowdrift. That year, as well as the seven Tolstoys plus Hannah, Aunt Toinette and Natalya Petrovna, there was Sonya’s uncle kostya, Tolstoy’s aunt Polina and his nephew and nieces kolya, Varya and Liza, plus the latter’s husband Leonid Dmitrievich, Tolstoy’s old friend Dmitry Alexeyevich Dyakov and his daughter Masha plus Sofya, her former governess and another visiting English governess, katie – all in all, twenty sat down to dinner. Late into the evening, uncle kostya started playing a waltz, and soon everyone was dancing, followed by the hilarious spectacle of watching the rotund, red-bearded Dmitry Alex-eyevich striking up a Cossack dance with Leonid Dmitrievich.

Christmas in Russia was about the only time the Tolstoy children were allowed toys. Tanya in particular cherished the dolls her godfather Dmitry Alexeyevich gave her – they were invariably called Masha, after his daughter, who turned sixteen in 1871, and whom she clearly idolised. Christmas was also the time for wearing masks, cross-dressing, and dressing up as animals, and the second day of festivities that year saw Tanya dressing up as a powdered Marquis in a long blue robe, accompanied by her brother Sergey as the Marquise. Ilya put on a red skirt, katie transformed herself into a clown, Liza became a muzhik, and Sonya donned Russian national dress. Next came the appearance of uncle kostya and kolya as the traditional dancing bears, led by Dmitry Alexeyevich in bast shoes, who was accompanied by a leaping goat whom the children gleefully recognised as their father.⁹⁹ This was one of the happiest times at Yasnaya Polyana, and also one of the last happy times.

When they were young, the elder children also used to look forward to the summer months when people came to visit. Their father’s friends (such as Afanasy Fet and his wife, Sergey urusov and Nikolay Strakhov) usually came to stay for a few days, but their aunt Tanya and their cousins Dasha, Masha and Vera, who were all under five in 1871, would take up residence in the other wing for over a month every summer. Sonya’s younger brother Stepan (‘uncle Styopa’) also spent every summer at Yasnaya Polyana from 1866 to 1878 while he was in his teens. Sometimes grandmother Lyubov came to stay (she was now living in Petersburg), and Aunt Polina would make regular visits from the convent in Tula which was now her permanent home. Summer had truly arrived after the buttercups appeared in the lawn in front of the house, and the children’s summer clothes had been unpacked and no longer smelled of camphor. It was the time for picnics with the samovar by the stream under the shade of an oak tree, with the girls reading poems aloud. It was the time for mushroom gathering and evening bonfires, sometimes with the thrill of watching the express train speed by the nearby village of kozlovka. Summer was also the time for jam-making, a ritual that took place every year in the garden under the lime trees, accompanied by clouds of bees and wasps buzzing overhead. Barefoot village girls would come up to the porch on hot afternoons bearing plates of mushrooms and strawberries to be exchanged for a few kopecks.