Tolstoy

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the passion amongst aristocratic Russian landowners for the regularity of formal gardens in the style of Louis XIV was superseded by an enthusiasm for more ‘natural’ English landscaping.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

The Russian country estate was many things – family seat, arena for artistic performance, rural retreat – but it was also a centre of agricultural production. As such, it reinforced the patriarchal ways which impeded Russia’s modernisation, since the arcadian idyll of the country estate was made possible by the peasants who sustained it. In terms of his wealth in human beings, that is to say, serfs, Volkonsky was a middle-ranking aristocrat, since he only had 159 ‘souls’ at Yasnaya Polyana, but he was in the majority. In early nineteenth-century Russia only three per cent of the nearly 900,000 members of the nobility owned more than 500 serfs. Nevertheless, it was free labour, and the peasants got a very raw deal, particularly after 1762, when the nobility were ‘emancipated’ from state service. The serfs had to wait another hundred years before they were emancipated in 1861. Until then, they were unable to own property, and could not marry without the permission of their owner, who had the right to subject them to corporal punishment or exile them to Siberia at whim.