Tolstoy

Very little is known about Maria Nikolayevna’s childhood and adolescence, and next to nothing is known about her early adulthood. Nikolay Volkonsky took his daughter for a six-week stay in St Petersburg when she was twenty, so she could be presented in society. She kept a diary, recording her impressions of the Romanov tombs in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral, the paintings by Raphael and Rubens in the galleries of the Hermitage, and the ballet, but there is otherwise scant information about her life at this time. The Volkonskys stayed in the capital with the recently widowed Princess Varvara Golitsyna, with whose family Sergey Nikolayevich had become very friendly. Portraits were exchanged as Maria Nikolayevna had been betrothed from childhood to one of the Golitsyns’ ten sons, but he died of fever before the wedding. Tolstoy believed his mother experienced a profound sense of loss when her fiancé died. (Supposedly, his name was Lev and Tolstoy was named after him, but this is just another family legend that Tolstoy subscribed to, for there was no Lev Golitsyn.)

The second most important emotional attachment formed by Tolstoy’s mother seems to have been with her French companion Louise Henissiènne, who lived at Yasnaya Polyana from 1819 to 1822. Maria Nikolayevna had already shown a desire for social justice unusual for her time by writing a story about a serf who is given her freedom, and she also befriended a young peasant girl at Yasnaya Polyana. Very soon after her father’s death in 1821 she proceeded to cause a scandal in Moscow by selling one of her estates and putting the proceeds in Louise Henissiènne’s name. The ‘ugly old maid’ with the ‘heavy eyebrows’, as malicious tongues referred to Maria Nikolayevna in letters, then created further scandal by arranging for her cousin Mikhail Volkonsky to marry Marie, the sister of her French companion. The following year she almost gave away her Oryol estate to Marie, finally giving her husband 75,000 roubles instead.⁴⁰ Maria Nikolayevna’s relatives found this wilful, headstrong behaviour shocking. Her youngest son Lev would have heartily approved, however. In due course, he would give away all his property.

Tolstoy was bewitched his whole life by thoughts of the mother he never knew, and was almost glad no portrait of her survived, as it meant he could concentrate his mind on her ‘spiritual image’. Her old maid Tatyana Filippovna told him when he was growing up that his mother had been self-possessed and reserved, but also hot-tempered. He treasured the idea of her blushing and shedding tears before uttering a rude word, although did not believe she even knew any rude words. And he was convinced that his eldest brother Nikolay probably inherited her best qualities – an unwillingness to judge, and extreme modesty. At the age of thirty-two, Maria Nikolayevna probably thought she would never marry, but she was then introduced by relatives to Nikolay Tolstoy, who was four years her junior and a distant relative (her great-grandmother Praskovya was his great-aunt). She was wealthy; he was in need of money. They were not in love, but they married in June 1822.

2

ARISTOCRATIC CHILDHOOD

Levin could barely remember his mother. His idea of her was a sacred memory for him.

Anna Karenina, Part One, Chapter 27¹

WHEN, TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, visitors to Yasnaya Polyana asked Tolstoy where exactly he was born, he sometimes pointed to the tip of a tall larch growing amongst a clump of trees next to his house. He was not suffering from dementia, nor was he born at the top of a tree, but indicating precisely the former location of his mother’s bedroom on the first floor of the columned mansion built by his grandfather Nikolay Volkonsky, where he spent his early childhood.² Despite this being the happiest period in his life, and despite his almost fetishistic reverence of his ancestors, particularly his maternal grandfather, Tolstoy sold off his ancestral home in 1854 after heavy gambling losses. The main house did not completely disappear: the neighbouring landowner who bought it dismantled it brick by brick and then rebuilt it on his property about twenty miles down the road. When Tolstoy came back to live permanently at Yasnaya Polyana in the late 1850s, he moved into one of the two wings Volkonsky had built on either side of the house and planted some maples and larches in the gaping space between them. Many decades later Tolstoy’s children developed a passionate desire to return their father’s house to its original location between the two wings. It was a hare-brained scheme that came to nothing, but in 1897, when he was sixty-nine, Tolstoy rode over to look at the house again, and seeing it brought back a flood of memories. He walked through its dilapidated rooms and came to a halt in one of the bedrooms. ‘This is where I was born,’ he said, thinking about his mother and the blissful days of his early childhood.³