Tolstoy

Tolstoy had his favourites amongst the gypsy girls, but he was chiefly drawn to the gypsies for their sultry, melancholic music and wild dancing. Gypsies had appeared in the Russian Empire in the early eighteenth century. Some settled, while others continued to lead a semi-nomadic life, lodging with Russian peasants during the winter months and earning their living by bartering horses in the summer. From the beginning they had also given professional performances of Russian songs as a way of earning money. The first Russian gypsy choir was formed in the 1770s by Count Orlov-Chesmensky, who brought together some of his gypsy-serfs from the family of Ivan Sokolov to perform at his estate outside Moscow. They were given their freedom in 1807, but their reputation only began to soar after the war with Napoleon was over, and they began to be invited to perform late into the night at Moscow’s restaurants and taverns. Soon choirs began to spring up in other Russian cities, launching great singing dynasties who performed a cappella, or to the accompaniment of violins and the Russian seven-stringed guitar. The gypsy choirs appealed to both the ends of the social spectrum – the merchantry and the nobility (particularly army officers), and they filled a gap. There were no other professional musicians in Russia at that time except for foreign virtuosi, and the chief virtue of the gypsy choirs was that they performed Russian songs, tinged with elements of their own distinct and exotic traditions. Perhaps uniquely, gypsies were not discriminated against in Russia, at least by the people amongst whom they lived. The gypsy choirs reached the peak of their popularity in the 1840s, and the one in Tula was reputed to be one of the best in Russia. Sergey’s inamorata Masha Shishkina (herself from one of the great gypsy musical dynasties) was its greatest songbird.²⁸ Hearing gypsy choirs perform in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod was certainly a highlight of the Marquis de Custine’s Russian tour in 1839. He was struck by their differences to other gypsies he had encountered:

Their wild and impassioned song has some distant resemblance to that of the Spanish gitanos. The melodies of the north are less lively, less voluptuous, than those of Andalusia, but they produce a more profoundly pensive impression … it was nearly midnight, but this house was still full of people, noise, and light. The women struck me as being very handsome; their costume, although in appearance the same as that of other Russian females, takes a foreign character when worn by them: there is magic in their glances, and their features and attitudes are graceful, and at the same time imposing. In short, they resemble the sibyls of Michael Angelo.²⁹

It was the gypsies who first spurred Tolstoy to think about writing a story, and they feature in one of his early unfinished pieces of fiction from 1853, in which the clearly autobiographical narrator laments that their art has already become debased. ‘There was a time when people loved gypsy music more than any other; when the gypsies sang the good old songs,’ the narrator writes, going on to maintain that gypsy music in Russia was the ‘only way for us to cross from popular to serious music’, unapologetic that his love for gypsy music had made him digress.³⁰

Tolstoy combined his love of popular Russian song with a serious enthusiasm for the classical European repertoire (particularly Beethoven, such as his Piano Trios, Op. 70), with which he largely became acquainted at the keyboard. He was still hell-bent on living up to the absurd standard he kept setting himself, but to judge from his week of diary entries in June 1850, he generally failed to follow his strict daily timetable for swimming, managing his serfs, reading and writing, and playing the piano that summer. Even if he chastised himself when he did not manage to play all twenty-four scales and arpeggios in two octaves every day, however, he could not help but attain a respectable level of proficiency of musicianship. He would continue to play the piano into his old age, sometimes playing duets with his wife Sonya or his sister Masha.