Tolstoy

If Tolstoy’s siblings seemed more settled than he was, it was because none of them nurtured such huge aspirations. As a female member of the provincial nobility, nothing was really expected of Maria except decorum. She and Valerian set up home at his Pokrovskoye estate in the Tula region, a day’s travel by carriage from Yasnaya Polyana, and they soon launched themselves into family life. Nikolay was serving in the Caucasus, having joined the army as a volunteer after leaving university in 1844. He had received his commission eighteen months later, and was now an ensign with the 20th Artillery Brigade, but his was by no means a brilliant army career, not least because he lacked ambition.⁵ The gifted, dashing Sergey would also join the army a few years later, and was expected to excel, but he lasted all of a year, due to his unwillingness to submit to authority and a similar lack of drive and ambition. The Pirogovo stud farm and large kennels he inherited were enough to keep him busy. Like Tolstoy, Sergey was passionate about hunting – he had soon shot so many wolves that he had enough bones to make an original fence along one of the paths on his estate.⁶ Otherwise his main passion in life was a gypsy girl in Tula.

Dmitry had ensconced himself on his Shcherbachevka estate in Kursk province. Like most of his class, he did not question the institution of serfdom, but he did feel morally obliged to show concern for his serfs. He also felt it was his duty as a Russian nobleman to serve, a conviction which was perhaps a vestige of Peter the Great’s rule, when lifelong service was imposed on the gentry in return for the privileges of noble status. The length of compulsory service to the state had been progressively reduced over the course of the eighteenth century until it became merely a matter of honour under Catherine the Great, but the idea of serving clearly lingered for high-minded young men like Dmitry Tolstoy. Accordingly, he set off for St Petersburg, where he naively presented himself to one of the Ministry of Justice’s mandarins and declared that he wished to be useful. Since he failed to specify what exactly he wanted to do, however, he was despatched to copy Chancellery documents, and was soon living the life of Akaky Akakievich in Gogol’s immortal story ‘The Overcoat’ (1842). In this merciless satire of the St Petersburg bureaucracy, the lowly copyist Akaky Akakievich, a man who is oblivious to his threadbare clothes, is eventually compelled to buy a new overcoat. In order to save enough money to pay his tailor, he practises extreme self-denial, and then the coat is stolen from him on the first day he wears it. Dmitry Tolstoy similarly paid no thought to his clothes, and merely dressed to cover his body, but his coat, ironically, was practically all he had. According to Tolstoy’s memoirs, his brother one day decided to visit a family acquaintance in the hope that he might help him find a better job. After arriving at Dmitry Obolensky’s dacha, and being invited to take off his coat and join the other guests, it turned out, to the embarrassment of all present, he was wearing nothing underneath, having decided a shirt was unnecessary.⁷ Apart from being actually quite well off, Dmitry differed from the hapless Akaky Akakievich in one other important respect: he became rapidly disillusioned at becoming another faceless cog in Nicholas I’s vast bureaucratic machine, and he soon retreated back to his estate, sending Obolensky a valedictory letter which made Tolstoy and Sergey wince (whatever Dmitry had written, Sergey told Tolstoy that it made him break out in a sweat, go red in the face and start pacing about the room in excruciating embarrassment).⁸