Tolstoy

The Tolstoy children remained in Moscow throughout the hot summer months following their father’s death, when otherwise they would probably have returned to Yasnaya Polyana. Aline was fortunate to be assisted by Aunt Toinette in caring for them. It was Toinette, for example, who took the children to the Bolshoi Theatre for the first time later that autumn. They sat in a box, and as an old man Tolstoy remembered that he had not immediately realised that he should not be looking straight across to the boxes opposite but sideways, down to the stage.¹² Even the children’s redoubtable grandmother now took a hand in their upbringing. Prospère Saint-Thomas had been engaged as French tutor for the elder boys, and three days after her son’s death Pelageya Nikolayevna decided to invite the fair-haired Frenchman from Grenoble to become resident governor to her grandchildren, replacing their kindly but not terribly competent German tutor Fyodor Ivanovich, who was consequently demoted. Being impressed by all things French, Pelageya Nikolayevna imagined Saint-Thomas would become the male authority figure that the children needed. The small, wiry Frenchman was certainly dynamic, but Tolstoy bridled at his self-importance and vanity, and he was also not impressed by his grandiloquent rhetorical flourishes.¹³ Saint-Thomas was also a harsh disciplinarian who forced his pupils to beg forgiveness for misdemeanours on their knees. Worst of all was the moment when he locked the young Lev up and threatened to punish him with the rod. In terms of its significance, the incident was certainly not on a par with his father’s death, but it nevertheless left a very deep impression on Tolstoy – so much so that some sixty years later he recalled in his diary the humiliation and misery of overhearing his family’s laughter and merriment while he was locked up ‘in prison’. In his memoirs, he went so far as to date his lifelong horror of violence back to this ordeal.¹⁴ It is telling that Tolstoy should have dwelled on this incident. In 1908 Lenin would famously characterise the ‘tearing off of masks’ as a hallmark of Tolstoy’s fiction and it seems that, at nine years old, Tolstoy was already capable of seeing through his French tutor’s pretentious veneer. Even though it was precisely at this point that he began to enjoy studying, his already obstinate and headstrong nature made him resent moreover submitting to the authority of a person he did not respect.¹⁵ Later on, he would resent submitting to any authority.

The friction in Tolstoy’s relationship with Saint-Thomas may have been caused by an awareness at some level that he possessed a superior intellect, but his mental acuity was not always on show, and certainly not on the day he tried to fly. It was more probably Tolstoyan dikost which impelled him to go up to the classroom on the mezzanine floor one day and take a running jump out of the window. He claimed afterwards that he had wanted to do something unusual and surprise everybody. Since everybody was at table, however, wondering where he was, they remained oblivious – until the mystery of young Lev’s absence was solved by the cook, who had seen him hurtling towards the ground through the kitchen window. As it turned out, Tolstoy was blessed with a strong constitution. He lost consciousness briefly and suffered some concussion, but was fully restored to health after sleeping solidly for eighteen hours.¹⁶

Just before the first anniversary of Nikolay Ilyich’s death in May 1838, babushka Pelageya Nikolayevna died after a long and painful illness. She was seventy-six. This death Tolstoy experienced fully, as he had to endure being taken with his siblings to kiss the lifeless white hand that lay on top of the mound of white linen on their grandmother’s high bed, and say goodbye to her before she breathed her last. He also had to confront the sight of her stern, hook-nosed face in the open coffin lying on the table before she was taken off to be buried, and put on a newly sewn black mourning jacket.¹⁷ Unable to contemplate any change to her formerly grand aristocratic lifestyle, Grandmother Pelageya had insisted on maintaining the family’s highly ritualised and formal dining habits after her son’s death, but now everything fell apart. Even the impractical Aunt Aline could see that the sums did not add up. After subtracting the money needed to pay various wages, bribes and dues, the income from the family’s five estates barely covered the rental of their Moscow house and the salaries of all the tutors who had been engaged, let alone any of their other expenses.