Tolstoy

He himself was very simple, extremely modest [this was early in his career] and so playful that his presence enlivened everybody. He spoke very rarely about himself [one rule he had followed!], but examined each new face with particular attention, and then relayed his impressions, which were nearly always quite extreme, in a most amusing way. The adjective thin-skinned, which his wife later applied to him, suited him exactly, so strongly was he affected by the slightest nuance that he caught. His unattractive face, with clever, kind and expressive eyes, replaced with their expression everything he lacked by way of refinement, and, it may be said, was superior to beauty.⁹

Along with Aunt Toinette, Alexandrine was one of the few women in Tolstoy’s life whom he really respected. She had not married or had children, and so he did not categorise her as a ‘typical’ woman, although he was certainly attracted to her. She clearly also felt there was a frisson between them. They were to fall out very badly over religion later on, at a time when Tolstoy burned his boats with nearly everyone he was close to, but they cared for each other deeply. Alexandrine was a tremendously intelligent, no-nonsense woman whose company Tolstoy greatly enjoyed. After Tolstoy became ensconced at Yasnaya Polyana, their contact became more sporadic, but their correspondence was always lively. It was to Alexandrine, of course, that Tolstoy invariably turned to when he needed a direct line to the Tsar, as she was extremely well connected at court. Addressing personal letters to the Tsar would become something of a habit with Tolstoy, and in the early days Alexandrine was a willing intermediary, although rather less so when her cousin became a public liability towards the end of his life by openly going head to head with the Russian government.

At the end of November, Tolstoy wrote an ebullient letter to his sister Masha to tell her how his meeting with Turgenev had gone (and how unscintillating Nekrasov had turned out to be). Just a few days later he received a letter from her, in which she exhorted him to come and visit their brother Dmitry, who was now gravely ill. Since Tolstoy was technically still on active duty with the army, he had to apply for leave, and was unable to get away until 1 January. By that time he had been transferred to a naval munitions unit in St Petersburg, which effectively left him free to pursue his own interests. Dmitry was now living in Oryol, south-west of Tula, and was being cared for by Masha and her husband along with Aunt Toinette and his common-law wife – a former prostitute also called Masha. Tolstoy arrived on 9 January to find Dmitry ravaged by tuberculosis, and in great suffering, his emaciated face dominated by huge staring eyes. unwilling to accept that he was going to die, Dmitry was convinced he would be healed with the help of a miracle-working icon, to which he prayed constantly. Tolstoy found the experience so distressing he left the next day. Dmitry died in his wife’s arms on 22 January 1856.

Tolstoy had not been in touch with Dmitry for over a year, and had not even known his brother was ill. All the Tolstoys had their share of dikost, particularly Lev, but Dmitry gave him a good run for his money. They shared the same uncompromising maximalist impulse. After the fiasco Dmitry had suffered in St Petersburg, he had returned to his estate in Kursk province, and taken a minor job in local government. In 1853 he had fallen seriously ill in Moscow, where he grew a huge beard and became very reclusive. When he realised he had not much longer to live, he suddenly relinquished all his ascetic habits and former piety and abandoned himself to a debauched life of drinking, gambling and whoring. He had ‘bought out’ Masha from her brothel, and then treated her very badly, throwing her out only to call her back.¹⁰ Dmitry, the ‘unloved’ brother, had written his last letter to Tolstoy from his Shcherbachevka estate in October 1854, telling him he had racked up nearly 7,000 roubles of debts and was sitting at home working in the garden and on the estate. Without telling his brother he was dying, he told him he was sad rather than bored: ‘sad because I am alone, and not what I might have been, and finally because nothing has quite worked out’.¹¹ Tolstoy had not approved of Dmitry’s sudden change of lifestyle, and did not reply. While he was in Oryol visiting Dmitry, he noted in his diary that all the bad thoughts he had harboured about him ‘crumbled to dust’ as soon as he saw him, but he still left.¹²