Tolstoy

‘BY HIS BIRTH, by his upbringing and by his manners, father was a real aristocrat. Despite the worker’s blouse he invariably wore, despite his complete contempt for all the nobility’s prejudices, he was a gentleman, and he remained a gentleman until the end of his days.’² Thus Tolstoy’s son Ilya summed up perhaps the greatest contradiction in the personality of a man whose whole life was a bundle of contradictions. For most of his life, Tolstoy never questioned his status as a barin (a landowning gentleman), and he was proud of his noble heritage. He continued to behave like an aristocrat long after he dropped his title and started wearing peasant clothes, because it was in his blood. ‘Although he wore the dress of a peasant, he had neither the aspect nor the bearing of a peasant. No muzhik [peasant] ever had his piercing eyes or his air of composure and mastery,’ wrote the economist James Mavor when reflecting on his meeting with the seventy-one-year-old writer in 1899.³ Whether it was someone seeing a weather-beaten peasant walking along a country road and noticing there was something about him which was ‘out of keeping with his garb’, as his American translator Isabel Hapgood commented,⁴ or the way in which Tolstoy invariably used the polite form of address when speaking to people, something defiantly aristocratic remained about his bearing.

Tolstoy certainly shared his family’s deep reverence for their ancestors. He loved the myths that surrounded them, and the feeling of being connected to them through the generations. According to one Russian Tolstoy specialist, he was even convinced ‘that he existed before he was born, that he was the product of all his ancestors who lived long before him’.⁵ That sense of being part of a continuum was indeed profoundly important for a writer whose life was so deeply bound up with his country’s history. Tolstoy also loved the fact that he was constantly reminded of his family’s past by the physical environment of Yasnaya Polyana, the country estate where he spent the greater part of his life, and which, as his son Lev was to comment, he regarded as ‘an organic part of himself’.⁶ His beloved home had been in his family for generations, it was where he was born, it was where he spent his early childhood, surrounded by family portraits, furniture and heirlooms, and it was really the only place where he was happy. It was fitting that he himself ultimately became an organic part of Yasnaya Polyana by being buried in the middle of its grounds. ‘It is difficult for me to imagine Russia and my attitude to it without my Yasnaya Polyana’, Tolstoy wrote in 1858, at the beginning of a projected essay about the summer he had spent the previous year on his estate. He explained that without Yasnaya Polyana he might understand certain general laws about Russia, but he would not love it with such a passion, and that this was the only form of love for the motherland that he knew.⁷

Tolstoy’s cult of his ancestors may have been a badge of pride, and fundamental to his own sense of identity, but it also furnished the inspiration for his great novels. His abiding interest in the generation of the 1825 Decembrist Uprising, for example, which was the inspiration behind War and Peace, was in part fuelled by his being distantly related to Sergey Volkonsky, who had been one of its leaders and a hero of the war with Napoleon. Tolstoy actually met Volkonsky in Florence in 1860. Volkonsky had recently returned from thirty years’ exile in Siberia, having been amnestied by Alexander II and was by then an old man. Once Tolstoy began writing War and Peace three years later, it was his ancestors who became the indispensable prototypes of many of its memorable central characters. For this reason alone it is worth extending our view of Tolstoy’s life back several generations.