Tolstoy

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.

When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy naturally transferred from the civil service to the army, fighting with distinction before being taken captive by the French. He was unable to afford to serve long in the prestigious and costly Cavalry Guards regiment to which he was transferred when he returned to St Petersburg in 1814, however, and then a combination of disillusionment with the military, ill-health and his father’s parlous financial situation led him to resign his commission. Since civil servants could not be sent to debtors’ prison, Nikolay Ilyich was obliged to take a job, and this became particularly necessary after the death of his father in 1820 left him as the sole provider for his sybaritic, spoiled mother, unmarried sister and cousin. After all the debts had been paid off, the family could afford only to rent a small flat in Moscow. When Tolstoy describes the position Nikolay Rostov finds himself in after the death of the old count in War and Peace, he is essentially telling the story of his father, who in 1821 took up a very minor appointment in Moscow’s military bureaucracy. The magic solution for Tolstoy’s father, as for Nikolay Rostov, was a rich bride. In the novel she appears as Princess Maria Bolkonskaya; in real life she was Princess Maria Volkonskaya. It was through Maria Volkonskaya that Nikolay Ilyich’s family came to be connected with Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate which would be irrevocably linked to Tolstoy’s name.

Tolstoy’s family pedigree meant a great deal to him. The passage in Part Two of Anna Karenina in which the old-world Russian noble Levin scoffs at nouveau riche aristocrats like Vronsky, who lack breeding and cannot point back to three or four generations, expresses a fair degree of his own snobbery. Also very telling is Levin’s contempt for the merchants he has to deal with – the up-and-coming Russian middle class. The aristocratic Tolstoy also had no time for merchants, and the fact that he invariably chose nobles or peasants to be his artistic heroes says a lot about his prejudices – he regarded the peasantry as the ‘best class’ in Russia. Compared to the Volkonskys, who were descended from the legendary Scandinavian settler Ryurik, the ninth-century founder of Russia, the Tolstoys were actually mere parvenus as a noble family. Tolstoy’s maternal ancestors came from some of the most venerable and distinguished families in Russia, but his paternal lineage did not actually go back all that far when compared with some of the great families of western Europe. As a Tolstoy, he was a count, but this was a title imported from Germany by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, along with that of baron, as part of his Europeanisation programme. These titles, which were a reward for service, furthermore kept their original German names, Graf and Baron. The Russian tradition of each child inheriting the family title, rather than just the eldest son, meant that there were soon hundreds of counts and barons mingling with the old-world Russian princes and princesses.