Tolstoy

Fyodor Ivanovich had led a colourful life, and it clearly meant a great deal to Tolstoy to have met his notorious ancestor when he was a child. In his memoirs he declares there is much he would have liked to say about this ‘extraordinary, lawless, and attractive man’, whose handsome, tanned face with thick sideboards extending to the corners of his mouth clearly left an unusually vivid impression on him as a young boy.⁴⁷ Fyodor Ivanovich had mellowed by the time he visited Yasnaya Polyana in the early 1830s, when he was in his fifties, but he was still eccentric, producing two embroidered lawn handkerchiefs which he claimed would magnetically cure the toothache suffered by Tolstoy’s elder brother Sergey.

When Fyodor Ivanovich visited Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was around seven years old. His earliest extant manuscript dates from around this time. The two notebook pages preserved in his archive were his contribution to a journal co-produced with his brothers:

Children’s Amusements

Section One

Natural History

Written by C[ount]. L[ev]. N. To[lstoy]: 1835

1. The Eagle

The eagle is king of the birds. They say that a boy started to tease him once, and he grew angry with him and pecked him to death.

2. The Falcon

The falcon is a very useful bird, it catches gazelles. The gazelle is an animal which runs very fast, so dogs cannot catch it; the falcon will swoop down and kill it.

3. The Owl

The owl is a very strong bird, and it cannot see in sunlight. An eagle owl is also an owl. The eagle owl only differs through its tufts.

4. The Parrot

The parrot is a very beautiful bird, its beak hangs down or is like a hook, and it is taught to speak.

5. The Peacock

The peacock is also beautiful, it has blue patches, and its tail is bigger than it is itself.

6. The Humming Bird

The humming bird is a very small little bird, it has a golden beak, it can be white.

7. The Rooster

The rooster is a beautiful bird, its brightly coloured tail hangs downwards, its throat is red, blue and all colours, and its wattle is red. When the Indian rooster sings, it lowers its tail and its throat, which is red, black and all colours, puffs up. The Indian rooster has a different tail to the rooster, the Indian rooster has a tail which is loose.

We know very little else about ‘Children’s Amusements’, and equally little about other literary ventures that the Tolstoy brothers engaged in during the 1830s. When he wrote his memoirs, Tolstoy had only a few distinct early childhood memories of his brothers, who were his first playmates, but there was one event which he remembered his whole life, and which was one of the most important and most cherished of all his memories. When he was about five years old, his beloved eldest brother Nikolay, then about eleven, announced that the secret to human happiness was written on a little green stick which was buried in the woods a short walk from their house. When the secret was revealed, he told his brothers, people would not only be happy, but they would also cease to be ill, and would no longer be angry with each other. At that point everybody would become ‘ant brothers’ (muraveinye bratya). Tolstoy explains in his memoirs that Nikolay must have read something about the Moravian Brethren (the moravskie bratya).