Tolstoy

Fyodor Tolstoy (1782–1846) earned a reputation for wildness at a young age, fighting his first duel at the age of seventeen soon after being commissioned as an officer in the elite Preobrazhensky Guards regiment in St Petersburg. In 1803, four years later, he escaped the confines of military life by securing, against all odds, a berth on Adam von Krusenstern’s three-masted British-built sloop Nadezhda. The mission was to complete the first Russian round-the-world expedition, along with a sister ship, the Neva.⁴⁵ After stops in Copenhagen, Falmouth and the Canary Islands, the Nadezhda set sail for Cape Horn, and thence for the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, where Fyodor Tolstoy acquired his famous tattoos. By this time, Captain Krusenstern was heartily fed up with the young officer. Unlike the naturalist, the astronomer, the artist and the doctor on board, Fyodor Ivanovich had nothing much to do, and so amused himself by provoking arguments with the crew, just for the sheer hell of it, and carrying out outrageous pranks, such as apparently letting loose an orang-utan (or was it a monkey?) in the captain’s cabin. He also got the ship’s priest paralytically drunk one day and then glued his beard to the deck with sealing wax. When the Nadezhda arrived at the Kamchatka peninsula on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire, before sailing on to Japan, Captain Krusenstern ordered Tolstoy to leave the ship.

Fyodor Tolstoy’s life became so shrouded in legend and prurient gossip that it is difficult to establish the veracity of the many stories which circulated about him, or even the facts of his departure from the Nadezhda. One story maintained that he had been abandoned on the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific between Kamchatka and Alaska, together with a monkey (or was it an orang-utan?), which he was later forced to eat out of hunger. The monograph of Fyodor Ivanovich which Tolstoy’s son Sergey published in 1926 refutes this. Sergey Tolstoy notes that he once had his hair pulled at the age of nine by a monkey when visiting Fyodor Tolstoy’s ageing daughter in Moscow in 1872: she always had a monkey as a pet in memory of the original one her father had kept. In his book, Sergey Tolstoy concludes that Fyodor Ivanovich was certainly put ashore, and definitely spent some time with native tribes on Sitka Island in southern Alaska, which was then part of the colony called ‘Russian America’. This is how Fyodor Ivanovich came to acquire his nickname of ‘Tolstoy the American’.⁴⁶

In August 1805, two years after leaving St Petersburg, Fyodor Tolstoy arrived back in the Russian capital, having made his way back across Siberia overland. He was promptly arrested and sent to serve for three years in a remote fortress in current-day Savonlinna, 150 miles north of St Petersburg. By risking his life in the Finnish War, against Sweden (Finland was formally annexed by Russia in 1809), Tolstoy was allowed to rejoin the Preobrazhensky Guards, but his nefarious exploits led to more duels and in 1811 he was dismissed from the army. Nevertheless, his swashbuckling spirit led him to volunteer when Napoleon invaded Russia and his bravery during the Battle of Borodino, during which he was wounded, resulted in him being restored to the ranks and decorated. It is not surprising that Fyodor Ivanovich came to Tolstoy’s mind when he was writing War and Peace. His relative provided him with the initial inspiration for the character of the desperate, fast-living Dolokhov, who shares his name and patronymic, as well his passion for cards.

In keeping with Tolstoyan dikost, Fyodor Ivanovich continued to be full of surprises after finally retiring to Moscow post-1812. He gave up fighting duels and gambling, and calmed down. In 1821 married a gypsy singer (after which he was promptly ostracised by many in Moscow society) and had twelve children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. Tolstoy got to know Fyodor’s widow Avdotya and daughter Praskovya in Moscow in the 1840s and 1850s. Fyodor Tolstoy became very pious as he got older, and those who asked to see his tattoos would see him first remove the large icon of St Spiridon, the patron saint of the Tolstoy family, which he wore round his neck, before showing off the brightly coloured bird in the middle of his chest, surrounded by red and blue patterns, and serpents on his arms.