Tolstoy

Toinette was two years older than Nikolay Ilyich, with whom she had grown up, and she remained devoted to him, but like Sonya in War and Peace, she stepped aside so he could find a bride with a large dowry and thus have some hope of settling his father’s enormous debts. Just as selflessly, Toinette became good friends with Maria Nikolayevna after his marriage. Six years after his wife died, perhaps prompted by fears for his health, Nikolay Ilyich proposed marriage to Toinette, but she declined, apparently not wanting to ruin what Tolstoy describes as her ‘pure, poetic’ relations with the family. She never spoke about this proposal, but she did accept Nikolay Ilyich’s second request: to become a mother to his children and never leave them. Tolstoy declares in his memoirs that it was his aunt Toinette who taught him the ‘spiritual pleasure’ of love. She never imparted instruction on how to live, or on the reading of morally edifying literature, nor did she ever talk about religion or how to pray. It was not words but Toinette’s ‘whole being’ which infected Tolstoy with love as a boy. Her moral and spiritual life was something which was completely internalised, and which manifested itself outwardly only in the supremely serene, unhurried and humble way in which she lived from day to day. This was something Tolstoy regarded as one of the greatest influences on his life.²⁸

Tolstoy can be forgiven for not remembering everybody in his early childhood. With all the Tolstoys and their dependants, not to mention the large number of servants who also had to be accommodated, the Yasnaya Polyana house must have been quite a warren in the early 1830s. Not until well into his memoirs does Tolstoy remember another person who joined their family at some point in his early childhood – a girl called Lyubov Sergeyevna, another illegitimate child born out of wedlock who was taken in out of pity. Like Pashenka and Dunechka, she did not have an easy life, but the Tolstoys did their best for her, even attempting, but failing, to matchmake between her and Fyodor Ivanovich, the children’s German tutor.²⁹ Fyodor Ivanovich was another person who always seemed to be there in Tolstoy’s childhood. He arrived in the summer of 1829 to take charge of Nikolay, who was then already six years old.

Foreign tutors were a fixture in Russian noble households, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, before serfdom was abolished. The offspring of aristocratic families did not, by and large, go to school, nor indeed was it feasible when so many of them grew up on remote country estates. Instead, tutors and governesses were imported, chiefly from France, Germany and England, and occupied a sometimes uneasy position in their new households between their employers and the domestic staff. Thus it was in the Tolstoy family. Fyodor Ivanovich was the Russian name the Tolstoys gave to Friedrich Rössel when he began his employment at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy does not say much about him in his memoirs, but points instead to the fact that his portrait of the German tutor Karl Ivanovich in Childhood was very true to life (and once even referred to Fyodor Ivanovich as Karl Ivanovich in one of his letters). He was a very kind and decent man, and beloved by the Tolstoy children, to whom he was devoted, but rather naïve, and not particularly well educated. The Tolstoy children all learned to speak good German – but with a distinct Saxon accent.³⁰

The other important people in Tolstoy’s early life, of course, were the servants – the nannies, butlers, valets, chefs, waiters, wine stewards and coachmen who were part of every Russian noble household during the years of serfdom. Some of them lived in the main family house; others in the grounds of the estate. As a baby, Lev was looked after first by old Annushka, who had been his brother Nikolay’s nanny. He remembered her having very dark eyes and one tooth, and the Tolstoy children were both thrilled and scared when they were told she was 100 years old. For Tolstoy, old Anna Ivanovna and the venerable family housekeeper Praskovya Isayevna had a special aura, having worked under his grandfather, Nikolay Volkonsky. Praskovya Isayevna was later immortalised by Tolstoy in Childhood, and he later declared that the portrait of Natalya Savishna was true to life.³¹