Tolstoy

The only Russian who ever came close to bearing comparison with the mighty Ilya of Murom was Tolstoy, who was just as devoted to his native land, and was similarly identified with it by Russians and foreigners alike (‘when you read Tolstoy’s works, it is impossible not to feel the Russian soul in them’ is a familiar refrain).³⁷ Tolstoy was thirty-five when he found his feet, as it were, and began writing War and Peace, his own epic, one of the longest and greatest works of fiction ever written (which he never regarded as a novel in the conventional sense). He was renowned for his physical strength and stamina, spending long periods in the saddle and fighting with bravery while serving with the Russian army. He had enormous wealth and a huge family, and was later to give it all up to live humbly and work on behalf of the peasantry, fighting against injustices of every kind and becoming the most influential spiritual leader in Russia, even proclaiming chastity. He was frequently portrayed in cartoons as a giant amongst the pygmies of contemporary Russian literature, or towering physically over his fellow writers, with one cartoonist actually portraying him as Ilya of Murom astride his mighty steed in a parody of Vasnetsov’s famous 1898 painting of the three bogatyrs (with Korolenko as Dobrinya Nikitich and Chekhov as Alyosha Popovich).³⁸ It is not surprising, then, that many visitors making the pilgrimage to visit the great sage of Yasnaya Polyana, and expecting to encounter a giant, were disconcerted to discover that Tolstoy was actually quite small.³⁹

After the deaths of their father and grandmother in 1837 and 1838, it took time for the young Tolstoys to settle down, and there was to be one more major upheaval for the family. In August 1841, on Tolstoy’s thirteenth birthday, his pious aunt Aline died during a prolonged stay at the Optina Pustyn Monastery, her already fragile health undermined by the strict fasting required of devout Orthodox believers. It was the deep spiritual wisdom of Optina’s elders which had drawn Tolstoy’s aunt Aline. After her death, guardianship of her three nephews and niece Masha, who legally were still minors (only Nikolay, the eldest had reached the age of eighteen), passed to her younger sister Pelageya, who had been named after their mother but was known in the family as Polina. The young Tolstoys barely knew their other aunt as she had remained in Kazan after their grandfather’s death. In 1818, when she was twenty, she had married a retired colonel from the Hussars, Vladimir Yushkov. Nikolay Tolstoy now wrote to Vladimir Ivanovich on behalf of his siblings in polished French:

We all ask our auntie – I, my brothers and my sister – not to leave us in our grief, and to become our guardian. You have to imagine, Uncle, the full horror of our situation. Please, Uncle, don’t refuse us, we ask you in the name of God and the departed [Aunt Aline]. You and Auntie are our only support in the world.⁴⁰

Because her husband had at one time nurtured romantic feelings for Toinette, and because she still harboured a grudge against her, Polina decided her brother’s children should relocate to Kazan. It would have been much more natural for Aunt Toinette to continue in loco parentis, but as a very distant relative, she was obliged to acquiesce with Polina’s wishes. None of the children wanted to go, nor did they want leave their beloved Aunt Toinette, who now went to live with her sister Elizaveta. In November 1841 the Tolstoys started packing up their belongings once again.

4

YOUTH

‘I have read all of Rousseau, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I did more than admire him – I worshipped him. When I was fifteen, I wore next to my skin a medallion with his portrait rather than a cross. Many of his pages are so close to me that it feels like I wrote them myself.’

Tolstoy in conversation with Paul Boyer, 1901¹