Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s mother Princess Maria Volkonskaya could trace her roots back at least to the thirteenth century, when one of her early ancestors was involved in altercations with the Mongol overlords of old Rus. A century later the family took its surname from the Volkona river in the area near Kaluga and Tula where they had lands. In 1763, when he retired from the army, Tolstoy’s maternal great-grandfather Major General Sergey Volkonsky bought a share of the Yasnaya Polyana property, south of Tula. Later he bought out the other five part-owners. Yasnaya Polyana, meaning ‘Clear Glade’, received its name for a very specific reason. In the sixteenth century, when the Muscovite state needed to stave off attacks from nomadic invaders such as the Crimean Tatars, it was able to make the most of a series of natural fortifications along its southern borders in the form of forests and rivers. Vulnerable border areas were strengthened by cutting down trees to form a solid barricade, known as a zaseka. The Kozlova Zaseka (named after a military leader called Kozlov) ran for several hundred miles, with clearings at various points which had gateways and access roads. Yasnaya Polyana was located in one of these clearings. It was originally called ‘Yasennaya Polyana’, because ash trees (yaseni) once grew there.²⁹

Tolstoy’s grandfather Nikolay Sergeyevich Volkonsky (1753–1821) inherited Yasnaya Polyana in 1784, and it was he who transformed it from a fairly ordinary piece of land into a carefully landscaped estate, complete with ponds, gardens, paths and imposing manor house when he retired from the army in 1799. Until the age of forty-six, Nikolay Sergeyevich had served in the army, having been signed up for military service when he was six. He was a guards captain in Catherine the Great’s retinue when she met Emperor Joseph II at Mogilev in 1780, and fought in the two victorious Russo-Turkish Wars which took place during her reign. After serving briefly as Russian ambassador in Berlin, he accompanied his victorious sovereign on her triumphant tour of the Crimea in 1787 and he was promoted to brigadier and then general-in-chief. In 1794 he was suddenly sent on compulsory leave for two years. According to Tolstoy family lore, this was because Volkonsky had refused to marry Varvara von Engelgardt, the niece and mistress of Prince Potemkin, the great favourite of Catherine the Great. Volkonsky’s brilliant career now came to a sudden halt, and he was more or less sent into exile by being appointed military governor in distant Arkhangelsk. Tolstoy greatly admired his grandfather’s feistiness, and he clearly enjoyed reproducing Nikolay Sergeyevich’s alleged reaction to Potemkin’s plan in his memoirs (‘Why does he think I am going to marry his wh …’). It was a story he loved to recount to his guests, and he even upbraided two early biographers for omitting it from their manuscripts.³⁰ The truth was, as usual, far more prosaic, as Potemkin had died in 1791 and Volkonsky was not posted to Arkhangelsk until 1798, by which time Catherine had been succeeded by her son Paul I. At some point in the late 1780s (information is sparse), Nikolay Sergeyevich appears to have married Princess Ekaterina Trubetskaya (1749–1792) in a marriage of convenience. His wife died at the age of forty-three, leaving a two-year-old daughter, Maria Nikolayevna. This was Tolstoy’s mother.

1. Portrait of Tolstoy’s maternal grandfather, Nikolay Sergeyevich Volkonsky

It was Paul I’s notoriously difficult temperament and constant fault-finding which ultimately prompted Volkonsky to resign permanently from the army in 1799 and retire to his country estate. He never remarried. For the remaining two decades of his life he devoted himself to the upbringing of his beloved daughter Maria, and to creating the idyllic surroundings for them to live in at Yasnaya Polyana which would in turn become instrumental to his grandson’s creativity. Volkonsky left one reminder of his military posting in the far north: he built a summer cottage on the banks of the Voronka river, near to Yasnaya Polyana, and named it ‘Grumant’. This was the Russian name at that time for Spitsbergen. Volkonsky was governor of Arkhangelsk, the gateway to the Arctic, and also of Spitsbergen, which had originally been discovered by fishermen and hunters from the area near Arkhangelsk. A village grew up around Volkonsky’s cottage which was also called Grumant, but the local peasants, for whom this was a very odd-sounding name, renamed it Ugryumy (‘Gloomy’). Tolstoy came here as a boy to fish in the pond.³¹