Tolstoy

Maria Nikolayevna may also have had in mind the exclusively Orthodox St Leo of Catania when she named her last son, and Lev proved to have even more in common with him. This St Leo is sometimes confused with the other St Leo, but seems to have been a more familiar figure in Russian folklore. It was well known, for example, that one should not look at shooting stars on St Leo’s day – peasants associated Lev katanskii with the verb katat’, meaning to roll (along).⁸ St Leo of Catania was a bishop who originally came from a noble family in Ravenna. He chose to turn his back on his wealthy background to devote his life to preaching Christianity and serving the poor, and was particularly known for his kindness to pilgrims and beggars. Tolstoy’s life followed a similar pattern, and like Bishop Leo, he came into direct conflict with his government during his lifetime. If St Leo was persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities of the Byzantine Empire for vehemently opposing the destruction of holy images during the iconoclast controversy in the eighth century, however, Lev Tolstoy was the scourge of the Russian Empire for being himself an iconoclast and respecting no authority, including, most famously, the Orthodox Church. Curiously, both St Leo of Catania and Lev Tolstoy were opposed at the end of their lives by apostates called Heliodoros (Iliodor in Russian), who were the cause of great scandals. St Leo’s adversary tried to lure Christians away with the help of the occult, while the renegade Russian monk Iliodor saw Tolstoy as the devil in human form, and only later came to repent. It is curious that Tolstoy began a story called ‘Father Iliodor’ in 1909, at the very end of his life, just when the monk Iliodor was causing his greatest scandals.⁹

Tolstoy was born in 1828, on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month in the year, and twenty-eight became his lucky number. He had become so superstitious by the time he reached adulthood, in fact, that in 1863 he ordered his wife to hold on until after midnight so that their first child Sergey could be born in the early hours of 28 June. He was also pleased to discover that the number twenty-eight was particularly significant in mathematics as the second ‘perfect’ number (it is also one of seven ‘magic’ numbers in physics). He would open books of poetry on the twenty-eighth page and wind his watch twenty-eight times. He even wove the number twenty-eight into his fiction: it is a symbolically important number in his last novel Resurrection, which concludes on chapter twenty-eight of its third part. Before making any decision, Tolstoy would toss a coin on to the parquet floor at Yasnaya Polyana, seeing a good or bad omen in whether it rolled over an odd or even number of the wooden squares.¹⁰ It was also no coincidence that Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana for the last time near the end of his life on 28 October (he was eighty-two when he died). He probably inherited his superstitious nature from his grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna, but it is a surprising trait to discover in someone who prided himself on the rationality of his thought.

Tolstoy was also superstitious about objects, such as the old leather couch on which he was born. Made by one of old Prince Volkonsky’s serfs, it was ritually taken from Nikolay Ilyich’s study and carried upstairs to Maria Nikolayevna’s bedroom in the corner of the house for the birth of each of their five children. Eleven of Tolstoy’s own children were born on it, not to mention two of his grandchildren (after five stillbirths, his eldest daughter Tanya gave birth to his favourite granddaughter Tanya on it in 1905).¹¹ Along with his desk, the couch was a permanent piece of furniture in each of the four rooms Tolstoy used as his study at Yasnaya Polyana at different times of his life, and it also makes an appearance in his novels. A very similar-sounding couch is brought out of Prince Andrey’s study for the birth of his son in War and Peace, and in one of the drafts of Anna Karenina it is also mentioned as a Levin family heirloom with a similar function.