Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s earliest memories were of being tightly swaddled as a baby, and screaming at being unable to stretch out his arms. ‘I feel the injustice and cruelty, not from people, as they pity me, but of fate, and of pity for myself,’ he wrote in the autobiography he began when he was fifty. He was uncertain as to whether this memory – of the complexity and contradictoriness of his feelings rather than of his cries and suffering – was not, in fact, a composite of many impressions, but he was sure this was the ‘first and strongest impression’ of his life. Tolstoy also claimed (rather improbably) to have recalled his ‘tiny body’ being bathed in a wooden tub by his wet-nurse Avdotya Nikiforovna, a peasant engaged from the village. His next memories date from when he was four, and lying in a cot next to his younger sister Maria. By this time, his mother had already died. We can only regret that ‘My Life’, as it was provisionally called, petered out after the first few vivid pages of his earliest recollections. The same happened with the memoirs he began a quarter of a century later, which cover only his early childhood.¹²

Maria Nikolayevna died in 1830 not long after the birth of her only daughter, also christened Maria. She had been married for eight years, and had led a very quiet life at Yasnaya Polyana. As Tolstoy records in his memoirs, it was nevertheless a peaceful and happy time, her days taken up with raising her family, and her evenings devoted to reading aloud to her mother-in-law. The one member of her family she did not see so much of was her husband, who was embroiled in endless court cases concerning his late father’s disastrous financial affairs, and often away. This was not easy for her, and she would sit for hours watching for his return in the gazebo in the corner of the estate. Her husband was obliged to write her letters reassuring her he had not forgotten her. ‘My sweet friend,’ he wrote to her in June 1824, ‘you finish your last letter by asking me not to forget you; you are going mad: can I forget that which constitutes the most noble part of myself?’ (‘Ma douce amie, tu finis ta dernière lettre avec une recommendation de non pas t’oublier; tu deviens folle: puis-je oublier ce qui fait la partie la plus élevé de moi même …’)¹³ Even when Nikolay Ilyich was at home, he was often out hunting, or according to one salacious claim, secretly pursuing other women.¹⁴ There was certainly some kind of romantic entanglement with a neighbour after his wife’s death, but Nikolay Ilyich was by all accounts an attentive husband, and he became a conscientious father as a single parent, devoted to his five children.

Tolstoy remembered his father well, even though he too died young. His father was by far the most important person in his life during his early years, and as Tolstoy himself was later to acknowledge, he did not realise quite how much he had loved him until after his death. Tolstoy describes him being of average height, well built, with pleasant features and a ruddy complexion, but with eyes which were always sad. The Tolstoy children loved their father for the funny stories he told, and the enchanting pictures he drew for them. He was clearly a charismatic man in many ways, but what Tolstoy later claimed to have particularly loved and admired about his father was his independent spirit and clear sense of his own dignity.¹⁵

Nikolay Ilyich was quite a gentle man, and he was certainly more lenient with his serfs than the previous master of Yasnaya Polyana, Prince Volkonsky. He also rarely resorted to corporal punishment, unlike many sadistic Russian nobles at that time. Nikolay Ilyich was a keen reader: he added substantially to the library his youngest son would one day inherit by purchasing quantities of French classics and works about natural history. Tolstoy was later informed by his aunts that his father never bought new books until he had read the ones he already owned, but he doubted whether his father really had waded through all those dusty French tomes on the history of the Crusades.¹⁶ Nikolay Ilyich was also artistically gifted, and produced many fine watercolours of idyllic rural landscapes and pen-and-ink drawings, including a sensitively drawn sketch of a spirited Bashkirian horseman in native costume with bow and arrow.¹⁷