Tolstoy

Tolstoy cherished his memories of his father cracking jokes at the dinner table, and of being allowed to come and sit beside him on the fabled leather sofa in his study while he smoked his pipe. There was one occasion when Nikolay Ilyich was particularly impressed with the pathos with which his youngest son Lev read aloud Pushkin’s poem ‘To the Sea’, which he had learned by heart.¹⁸ The poem was written in 1824, when Pushkin was taking leave of the south after his period of exile, and by the time the young Tolstoy came to recite its lines a decade later, the fateful duel which killed the young poet in 1837 was only a few years away. The ocean was probably the one element which would never hold any attraction for Tolstoy. He lived in the heartland of Russia for nearly all his long life, far from any salt water, so may not later have identified with the sentiments in Pushkin’s last stanza, in which the poet speaks of carrying into the ‘woods and silent wildernesses’ of Russia the sea’s cliffs and coves, and the sound of its waves. But as if to compensate, Tolstoy was moved to shed an ocean of salty tears over his lifetime by music or stories of suffering. The emotional sensitivity his father noticed in him as a young boy rendered him very susceptible to crying: it was not for nothing that one of his nicknames as a child was Lyova-Ryova – ‘Lyova the howler’.

As a small boy, Tolstoy liked to see his father elegantly dressed in frock-coat and close-fitting breeches in preparation for trips into town, but his most vivid memories of his father were connected with hunting. Nikolay Tolstoy loved hunting – both riding to hounds and shooting – and he had a particular affection for two servants, the brothers Petrusha and Matyusha, who usually accompanied him. Like many of his class, Nikolay Tolstoy considered hunting second only to warfare as an arena for showing courage and bravado, and so Tolstoy and his brothers were thus trained to hunt from a young age.¹⁹ Nikolay Ilyich thought it important for his sons to start learning to be real men as early as possible and they were each given ponies. In old age Tolstoy cherished memories of walking with his father through the long grass of the meadows with his beloved borzoi puppies running circles round them.²⁰ Tolstoy himself would become a passionate huntsman (the hunting scenes in War and Peace are amongst the most lovingly written in the novel), and it took him a long time in later life to relinquish an activity which clearly contravened the moral and religious principles he embraced after his spiritual crisis. Tolstoy never abandoned horseriding, however, and his love of horses can be seen both in the exquisite detail of his description of Vronsky’s horse Frou-Frou in Anna Karenina, and in ‘Kholstomer’ (‘Strider’), the remarkable story he began in the 1860s and later revised, which is told from a horse’s point of view.

Tolstoy’s most vivid memories of his father may have been connected with hunting, but his fondest ones were of seeing him sitting next to his grandmother on the sofa, and helping her lay out the cards for patience while she occasionally took snuff from her gold snuffbox. His aunts would be in armchairs nearby, one of them reading aloud, while in another armchair his father’s favourite borzoi Milka would be curled up asleep, or gazing at everyone with her beautiful black eyes (she appears in War and Peace as herself). In his memoirs, Tolstoy recollects a particular evening when his father stopped whichever aunt was reading aloud and pointed to the mirror on the wall. Tikhon the manservant could be seen stealing furtively on tiptoes into his study and stealing tobacco from his leather pouch. Tolstoy’s father found this very amusing.²¹

Nikolay Ilyich had a busy life, and he worked hard to restore the family fortunes. He certainly proved to have greater business acumen than his hapless father, and he left his children a legacy that amounted to far more than his late wife’s dowry. In 1832 he owned 793 male and 800 female serfs, including 219 ‘souls’ at Yasnaya Polyana and the surrounding villages. He was particularly pleased to be able to re-acquire Nikolskoye-Vyazemskoye, one of his mother’s estates that had previously been mortgaged. Tolstoy later inherited it when his brother Nikolay died. In 1837 Tolstoy’s father was also able to buy Pirogovo, a large estate not far from Yasnaya Polyana, which came with 472 serfs, and was later inherited by Tolstoy’s brother Sergey and his sister Maria.