Tolstoy

Foka Demidych, the family butler, had played second violin in the orchestra, but his performances in the 1830s, when Tolstoy was growing up, were restricted to announcing in his blue frock-coat every day at two o’clock that lunch was served, with as much ceremony as possible. The Tolstoys actually lived quite austerely compared with many noble families – apart from a pair of fine gilt-framed mirrors, some Voltaire armchairs and some mahogany tables, the house was decorated in a fairly spartan fashion, with furniture and table linen produced by their own carpenters and weavers. But in other respects the old patriarchal traditions of the Russian aristocracy were studiously maintained. Tolstoy comments proudly in his memoirs that his father did not have to undergo the indignity of having to become a civil servant in Nicholas I’s government, and indeed he could not remember ever having even seen an official during his childhood and youth.³⁴

The Tolstoys had various rituals which were faithfully observed. Each day began and ended with members of the family kissing each other’s hands, and every Sunday they would troop off to the village church (where the children would try to copy their father, who bowed so low his right hand touched the ground).³⁵ But it was lunch which was the most ritualised occasion in the Tolstoys’ daily life. The entire family, including the children and their tutor, would gather in the drawing room to wait for Nikolay Ilyich to emerge from his study, and at the appointed time he would offer his hand to his mother to escort her into the dining room. Servants holding plates against their chests with their left hands would be stationed behind each family member’s chair, while guests would be attended to by their own servants. At the end of each meal, Tolstoy’s father would be handed his pipe and he would retire to his study; babushka would proceed to the drawing room and the children would go downstairs with Fyodor Ivanovich and draw pictures.

Tolstoy was the first to acknowledge how idyllic and privileged his early childhood was. Like so many Russian country estates at that time, Yasnaya Polyana was an almost self-sufficient kingdom, with its own population of serfs to till the fields, milk the cows, chop wood, weave carpets, cobble shoes, groom the horses, breed hounds for hunting, clear paths, complete the accounts, prepare meals, fetch water and do the laundry. It was also a whole world which Tolstoy never had to leave. Yasnaya Polyana provided a sheltered environment for him to grow up in, surrounded by his relatives and an extensive second family of household servants. It was also an elite school where he began his education with a private tutor, and an enormous playground whose woods, ponds, winding paths and streams promised the possibility of endless enticing adventures. Finally, it was a physically beautiful landscape of tree-lined avenues, elegant gardens and tranquil ponds. Tolstoy remained cocooned in this rural paradise for the first eight years of his life; indeed, the most significant journey he made during this period was downstairs, when he left the nursery at the age of five to join his elder brothers and come under the charge of his German tutor.

There are precious few third-person accounts of Tolstoy as a little boy, but his mischievousness stands out even in those few sources. In a letter Aline wrote to Toinette when he was around six, for example, she made a point of saying that it was some time since ‘little Lev’ had been dismissed from the dinner table, suggesting this had hitherto been a regular occurrence. Tolstoy’s ‘originality’ was also noticed from an early age: his relatives remembered their amusement when the young boy took it into his head one day to come into the drawing room, turn round and bow to everybody present with his backside, throwing his head back, instead of inclining it, and clicking his heels.³⁶