Tolstoy

LOOKING BACK OVER HIS LIFE when he was in his seventies, Tolstoy described the ‘innocent, joyful, poetic period’ of his childhood as lasting until he was fourteen.² Only the first seven of those fourteen years were truly cloudless, however. In the second seven, Tolstoy lost his father, his grandmother and his aunt, was temporarily separated from his elder brothers, and moved three times. The last upheaval resulted in a relocation several hundred miles from home. In a very real sense, the most idyllic part of Tolstoy’s childhood began its decline with the first of those relocations, when the reassuring bucolic surroundings of Yasnaya Polyana were exchanged for the intimidating new world of metropolitan Moscow. It is these years, and the ones immediately following, which are amongst the least documented in what is generally an over-documented life. With a few exceptions, Tolstoy’s memoirs essentially come to a halt with the family’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana, although his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth is also a wonderful source of atmospheric detail about his early years, since it is clearly rooted in his own experience, despite it being a work of fiction.

Tolstoy’s father moved his family to Moscow in January 1837 for the sake of the elder boys’ education. Lev was only eight years old, but his eldest brother Nikolay was now fourteen, and already preparing for his university entrance. The relocation was a major undertaking, since the family was numerous, comprising the five Tolstoy children, two wards, two aunts, Nikolay Ilyich and his mother, and was accompanied by a full complement of thirty servants.³ The journey north lasted two days, and involved a caravan of seven carriages, plus a special closed sleigh for grandmother Pelageya Nikolayevna. To make her feel safe, she was chaperoned by two of the family’s manservants, who were forced to endure freezing temperatures and stand on the runners all the way.⁴ The children took it in turns to sit with their father, and when they finally drove into Moscow, it was Lev who was lucky enough to be sitting next to him as he proudly pointed out the churches and prominent buildings they could see through the carriage windows.⁵

Arriving from the south, the Tolstoys would have driven through the colourful merchants’ quarter, the Zamoskvorechie (‘Beyond the Moscow river’) and so would have first seen a profusion of onion-domed churches. The merchants were traditionally the most pious section of the Russian population, and the Zamoskvorechie had the greatest concentration of churches in Moscow, which was already a city renowned for its large number of churches. Nikolay Ilyich had rented a handsome house with a mezzanine set back from the street in a spacious courtyard, and after driving through the Zamoskvorechie, the Tolstoy family caravan would have turned west and arrived in a quiet residential area near to the Moscow river. It was to this part of Moscow that Tolstoy returned when his own family moved to the city in the 1880s.

In old age, Tolstoy had only dim memories of these first few months in the old capital. The city had by now fully recovered from the traumatic events of 1812, following an intense period of reconstruction, and the new urban surroundings would have seemed overwhelming for a boy used to a trantranquil rural environment; he now found himself in the midst of buildings and strangers, and no longer the centre of attention. Nikolay was busy preparing for the university, and the Tolstoy children rarely saw their father, who had engaged as many as twelve tutors (including a dancing teacher) to keep his children busy, at an imposing annual cost of 83,000 roubles.⁶ Meanwhile Nikolay Ilyich had become embroiled in a lawsuit over his purchase of the estate of Pirogovo from Alexander Temyashev, the man who had begged him to bring up his illegitimate daughter Dunechka. Temyashev was stricken with paralysis shortly after the contract was signed, and his relatives wanted the deeds declared null and void. As far as Tolstoy’s father was concerned, however, he was now its legitimate owner. Nikolay Ilyich’s health had been frail ever since his gruelling time in the army during and after the Napoleonic invasion. The stress of having to pick up the pieces and take responsibility after his father’s bankruptcy, dismissal from the governorship of Kazan and untimely death had not helped. Tolstoy’s father also had a tendency to drink too much. In 1836 he had written to a friend to tell him he was on a strict diet and taking medicines after experiencing the shock of coughing up a lot of blood.⁷

2. The house in Plyushchikha Street, Moscow, to which Nikolay Ilych Tolstoy brought his mother, sister and five children in 1837