Tolstoy

Some drastic decisions had to be taken, which resulted in the family being split up, with Aline remaining in Moscow with Saint-Thomas, her ward Pashenka and the two eldest boys. They now moved to a smaller and much cheaper flat, but were glad to leave behind the big house ‘which had seen so many tears’. The two youngest boys, their sister Masha and Dunechka accompanied Aunt Toinette and Fyodor Ivanovich back to Yasnaya Polyana.¹⁸

One casualty of the downsizing was the Tolstoys’ faithful coachman Mitka Kopylov, whom the family could no longer afford to keep on. His strength and agility, combined with his diminutive size, had also made him an irreplaceable and valued postilion, and the rewards for his good service and his pride in his work were reflected in the silk shirts and velvet coats he wore. There were plenty of Moscow merchants ready to give such a smartly turned-out coachman a wage, but when Mitka’s brother was conscripted into the army due to the quota system that was in operation, he was forced to go back to work as a labourer at Yasnaya Polyana. Conscription always represented a major loss for peasant families, even after the term of service was reduced to twenty years, as soldiers in the infantry were not able to return home while serving. It was particularly difficult in this case. Mitka’s elderly father now needed his other son to come back and work in the fields, and within a few months the debonair new Muscovite had gone back to being a drably dressed peasant in bast shoes. As a serf, he had no choice, and Tolstoy later explained that Mitka’s quiet acceptance of his lot, and the uncomplaining way he surrendered a job he loved for heavy agricultural work, were highly influential on his nascent feelings of affection and respect for the Russian peasantry.¹⁹

Although he had partly enjoyed the experience of living in Moscow, and the chance to make new friends, Tolstoy must have been relieved to escape from his tutor and go back home to Yasnaya Polyana after his grandmother’s death. He and Dmitry were now able to go and visit the new estate at Pirogovo, which had a fine stud farm, and they each received their own pony. It would be two years before the brothers were all reunited at Yasnaya Polyana, but in the meantime they started writing to each other. At this stage their correspondence was not terribly exciting. A week after Dmitry and Lev left Moscow, Sergey wrote to tell them that all was well in their new home, and that the cactus was about to start flowering. Lev wrote back to tell Sergey and Nikolay about his new pony. Sometimes Nikolay wrote, sometimes the letters were in French, and sometimes the elder brothers deigned to include their sister Masha as an addressee.²⁰ Occasionally Dunechka also got a mention in their letters, but she left the family in March 1839 to go to a boarding school in Moscow, and Tolstoy now became closer to Masha for the first time as a result.²¹

In August 1839 the cadet branch of the family enjoyed a leisurely journey back to Moscow for a visit. Since they were travelling in the summer months, and since Tolstoy was now eleven, and curious about everything, it was a great adventure for him. Most exciting of all, however, was the prospect of seeing the Tsar lay the cornerstone of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This was the Cathedral Alexander I had pledged to build back in 1812 when Napoleon retreated from Moscow, ‘to preserve the eternal memory of that unprecedented zeal, loyalty for the Faith and the Fatherland with which the Russian people exalted itself in these difficult days, and to mark Our gratitude to God’s Providence, by saving Russia from the ruin threatening her’.²² Five years after Napoleon had been driven from Moscow, the cornerstone had been laid in 1817 at a magnificent ceremony attended by 400 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy, 50,000 guards officers, the Tsar and his family and hundreds of thousands of their loyal subjects. But despite the injection of 16 million roubles from the state treasury, and the labour of some 20,000 serfs specially drafted in for the purpose, construction had not gone according to plan. Officially it came to a halt because the foundations were insufficiently secure. In reality, the money was embezzled, creating a huge scandal whose duration was long enough to provide inspiration for Gogol’s classic play about Russian corruption, The Government Inspector, in 1836.²³