TOLSTOY

ALSO BY ROSAMUND BARTLETT

Wagner and Russia (1995)
Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (2004)

CO-AUTHORED

Literary Russia: A Guide (1997)

EDITED AND CO-EDITED

Shostakovich in Context (2000)
Victory over the Sun: the World’s First Futurist Opera (forthcoming)

TRANSLATED AND EDITED

Anton Chekhov, About Love and Other Stories (2004)
Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters (co-translated with A. Phillips, 2004)
Anton Chekhov, The Exclamation Mark (2008)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (forthcoming)

TOLSTOY

A RUSSIAN LIFE

Rosamund Bartlett

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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This eBook edition published in 2010

Copyright © Rosamund Bartlett, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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eISBN 978 1 84765 283 6

for Lucy

CONTENTS

Map

Chronology

Tolstoy Family Tree

Bers Family Tree

Note on Conventions

Introduction

1 Ancestors: The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys

2 Aristocratic Childhood

3 Orphanhood

4 Youth

5 Landowner, Gambler, Officer, Writer

6 Literary Duellist and Repentant Nobleman

7 Husband, Beekeeper and Epic Poet

8 Student, Teacher, Father

9 Novelist

10 Pilgrim, Nihilist, Muzhik

11 Sectarian, Anarchist, Holy Fool

12 Elder, Apostate and Tsar

Epilogue: Patriarch of the Bolsheviks

Notes

Further Reading in English

Select Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgements

Index

CHRONOLOGY

TOLSTOY FAMILY TREE

Note: The Tolstoy and Bers family trees reproduced here are principally designed to clarify the genealogies of Tolstoy and his wife Sonya and are not comprehensive.

BERS FAMILY TREE

NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

A simplified transliteration system has been used in the body of the text (e.g. ‘Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy’), but a more accurate one in the notes and bibliography (e.g. ‘Petr Andreevich Tolstoi’). Exceptions are made in the case of accepted spellings such as ‘Potemkin’ (pronounced ‘Potyomkin’), ‘Tchaikovsky’ and ‘Bolshoi Theatre’.

Russian dates before 1918 are given according to the Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century, and thirteen days behind in the twentieth century.

INTRODUCTION

IN JANUARY 1895, deep in the heart of the Russian winter, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy left Moscow to go and spend a few days with some old friends at their country estate. He had just experienced another fracas with his wife over the publication of a new story, he felt suffocated in the city, and he wanted to clear his head by putting on his old leather coat and fur hat and going for some long walks in the clear, frosty air, far away from people and buildings. His hosts had taken care to clear the paths on their property, but Tolstoy did not like walking on well-ordered paths. Even in his late sixties he preferred tramping in the wilds, so he invariably ventured out past the garden fence and strode off into the deep snow, in whichever direction his gaze took him. Some of the younger members of the household had the idea of following in his footsteps one evening, but they soon had to give up when they saw how great was the distance between the holes left in the soft snow by his felt boots.¹

The sensation of not being able to keep up was one commonly felt by Tolstoy’s contemporaries, as he left giant footprints in every area of his life. After racking up enormous gambling debts as a young man, during which time he conceived and failed to live up to wildly ambitious ideals, he turned to writing extremely long novels and fathering a large number of children. When he went out riding with his sons, he habitually went at such a fast pace they could barely keep up with him. Then he became moral leader to the nation, and one of the world’s most famous and influential men. A tendency towards the grand scale has been a markedly Russian characteristic ever since the times of Ivan the Terrible, who created an enormous multi-ethnic empire by conquering three Mongol Khanates in the sixteenth century. Peter the Great cemented the tradition by making space the defining feature of his new capital of St Petersburg which arose in record time out of the Finnish marshes. By the time Catherine the Great died at the end of the eighteenth century, Russia had also become immensely wealthy. Its aristocrats were able to build lavish palaces and assemble extravagant art collections far grander than their Western counterparts, with lifestyles to match. But Russia’s poverty was also on a grand scale, perpetuated by an inhumane caste system in which a tiny minority of Westernised nobility ruled over a fettered serf population made to live in degrading conditions. Tolstoy was both a product of this culture and perhaps its most vivid expression.

Many people who knew Tolstoy noticed his hyper-sensitivity. He was like litmus paper in his acute receptivity to minute gradations of physical and emotional experience, and it was his unparalleled ability to observe and articulate these ever-changing details of human behaviour in his creative works that makes his prose so thrilling to read. The consciousness of his characters is at once particular and universal. Tolstoy was also hyper-sensitive in another way, for he embodied at different times of his life a myriad Russian archetypes, from the ‘repentant nobleman’ to the ‘holy fool’. Only Russia could have produced a writer like Tolstoy, but only Tolstoy could be likened in almost the same breath to both a tsar and a peasant. From the time that he was born into the aristocratic Tolstoy family in the idyllic surroundings of his ancestral home at Yasnaya Polyana to the day that he left it for the last time at the age of eighty-two, Tolstoy lived a profoundly Russian life. He began to be identified with his country soon after he published his national epic War and Peace when he was in still his thirties. Later on, he was equated with Ilya Muromets, the most famous Russian bogatyr – a semi-mythical medieval warrior who lay at home on the brick stove until he was thirty-three – then went on to perform great feats defending the realm. Ilya Muromets is Russia’s traditional symbol of physical and spiritual strength. Tolstoy was also synonymous with Russia in the eyes of many of his foreign admirers. ‘He is as much part of Russia, as significant of Russian character, as prophetic of Russian development, as the Kremlin itself,’ wrote the liberal British politician Sir Henry Norman soon after visiting Tolstoy in 1901.² For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, meanwhile, Tolstoy had ‘no face of his own; he possesses the face of the Russian people, because in him the whole of Russia lives and breathes’.³

Tolstoy lived a Russian life, and he lived many more lives than most other Russians, exhibiting both the ‘natural dionysism’ and ‘Christian asceticism’ which the philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev defines as characteristic of the Russian people.⁴ First of all he lived the life of his privileged class, educated by private foreign tutors and waited on by serfs. He became a wealthy landowner at the age of nineteen, and immediately began exhibiting Russian ‘maximalist’ tendencies by squandering his inheritance on gypsy singers and gambling. Whole villages were sold off to pay his debts, followed by his house. Tolstoy also lived up to the reputation of the depraved Russian landowner by taking advantage of his serf girls, then assumed another classic identity of the Russian noble: he became an army officer. For most of his comrades-in-arms the next step was retirement to the country estate, but Tolstoy became a writer – the most promising young writer of his generation. It was at this point that he started showing signs of latent anarchism: he did not want to belong to any particular literary fraternity, and soon alienated most of his fellow writers with his eccentric views and combative nature. Turgenev disappointed him by failing to take writing as seriously as he did, and for being too enslaved to western Europe. Turgenev’s creative work was as deeply bound up with Russia as Tolstoy’s was, but he lived in Paris. Tolstoy made two visits abroad during his lifetime, but he was tied to Russia body and soul.

As he matured under the influence of the writers and philosophers who shaped his ideas, Tolstoy inevitably became a member of the intelligentsia, the peculiarly Russian class of people united by their education and usually critical stance towards their government. The deep guilt he now felt before the Russian peasantry, furthermore, made him a repentant nobleman, ashamed at his complicity in the immoral institution of serfdom. Like the Populists, Tolstoy began to see the peasants as Russia’s best class, and her future, and around the time that serfdom was finally abolished he threw himself into teaching village children how to read and write. But he was mercurial, and a year later abandoned his growing network of unconventional schools to get married and start a family. The emotional stability provided by his devoted wife Sofya (‘Sonya’) Bers enabled him next to become Russia’s Homer: War and Peace was written at the happiest time in his life.

Tolstoy’s overactive conscience would not allow him to continue along the path of great novelist, and in the first half of the 1870s he went back to education. This time he devised his own system for teaching Russian children from all backgrounds how to read and write, by putting together an ABC and several reading primers. He taught himself Greek, then produced his own simplified translations of Aesop’s fables, as well as stories of his own, a compilation of tales about Russian bogatyrs and extracts from sacred readings. The Yasnaya Polyana school was reopened, with some of the elder Tolstoy children as teachers. Tolstoy was more of a father during these years than at any other time, and he took his family off to his newly acquired estate on the Samaran steppe for an unorthodox summer holiday amongst Bashkirs and horses. He revelled in the raw, primitive lifestyle, even if his wife did not.

In the second half of the 1870s everything began to unravel. In 1873, the year in which he began Anna Karenina, Tolstoy first spoke out on behalf of the impoverished peasantry by appealing nationwide for help in the face of impending famine. Anna Karenina, set in contemporary Russia, reflects Tolstoy’s own search for meaning in the face of depression and thoughts of death. Initially, he found meaning in religious faith and became one of the millions of pilgrims criss-crossing the Russian land on their way to visit its hallowed monasteries. Like many fellow intellectuals, Tolstoy was drawn to the Elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery – monks who had distanced themselves from the official ecclesiastical hierarchy by resurrecting the ascetic traditions of the early Church Fathers, and who were revered for their spiritual wisdom. He found it was the peasants who had more wisdom to impart, however, and the next time he went to Optina Pustyn, he walked there, dressed in peasant clothes and bast shoes like a Strannik (‘wanderer’). The Stranniks were a sect who spent their lives walking in pilgrimage from one monastery to another, living on alms. The nomadic spirit runs deep in Russia, and Tolstoy increasingly hankered as time went on to join their ranks. He had long ago started dressing like a peasant, but he soon wanted to dispense with money and private property altogether.

From extreme piety Tolstoy went to extreme nihilism. At the end of the 1870s he began to see the light, and he set down his spiritual journey in a work which came to be known as his Confession. He also undertook a critical investigation of Russian Orthodox theology, and produced a ‘new, improved’ translation of the Gospels. Over the course of the 1880s he became an apostle for the Christian teaching which emerged from his root-and-branch review of the original sources, and at the same time his newfound faith compelled him to speak out against the immorality he now saw in all state institutions, from the monarchy downwards. Home life now became very strained, particularly after Tolstoy renounced the copyright on all his new writings and gave away all his property to his family. He discovered kindred spirits amongst the unofficial sectarian faiths which proliferated across Russia, whose followers were mostly peasants, and gradually became the leader of a new sectarian faith, although his followers were mostly conscience-stricken gentry like himself. These ‘Tolstoyans’ sometimes vied with each other to lead the most morally pure life, giving up money and property, living by the sweat of their brow and treating everyone as their ‘brother’. Thus one zealous Tolstoyan even gave up his kaftan, hat and bast shoes one summer, glad to be no longer a slave to his personal possessions.⁵

By the 1890s Tolstoy had become the most famous man in Russia, celebrated for a number of compellingly written and explosive tracts setting out his views on Christianity, the Orthodox Church and the Russian government, which were read all the more avidly for having been banned: they circulated very successfully in samizdat. It was when Tolstoy spearheaded the relief effort during the widespread famine of 1892 that his position as Russia’s greatest moral authority became unassailable. The result was a constant stream of visitors at his front door in Moscow, many of whom simply wanted to shake his hand. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Sergey Diaghilev, who with characteristic chutzpah turned up one day with his cousin, and immediately noticed the incongruity of Tolstoy’s peasant dress and ‘gentlemanly way of behaving and speaking’. Tolstoy had come for a rest from the famine-relief work he had been doing in Ryazan province, and talked to the sophisticated young aesthetes from St Petersburg about soup kitchens. Diaghilev shared his impressions with his stepmother:

When we got out into the street, our first words were exclamations: ‘But he’s a saint, he’s really a saint!’ We were so moved we almost wept. There was something inexpressibly sincere, touching and holy in the whole person of the great man. It’s funny that we could smell his beard for a long time, which we had touched as we embraced him …⁶

Tolstoy received thousands of visitors in the last decades of his life, and he had a reputation for rarely turning anyone away. Before long, he became known as the ‘Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’.

Tolstoy received over 50,000 letters during his lifetime, 9,000 of which came from abroad. With the help of the eminence grise of the Tolstoyan movement, Vladimir Chertkov, who found him secretaries, he did his best to answer as many as he could (there are 8,500 letters printed in his Collected Works, and there must have been many more).⁷ Chertkov was the scion of a distinguished noble family who became Tolstoy’s trusted friend, and the chief publisher of his late writings. Tolstoy’s family often felt neglected. It was his wife Sonya who bore the brunt of domestic duties, almost as a single parent of their eight children, some of whom were very unruly. She also had the demanding job of publishing her husband’s old writings, which guaranteed the family some income, even if her profitable enterprise caused him pain. It was not easy being a member of Tolstoy’s family. Sonya wrote to her husband in 1892: ‘Tanya told someone in Moscow, “I’m so tired of being the daughter of a famous father”. And I’m tired of being the wife of a famous husband, I can tell you!’⁸

Tolstoy’s fame increased further when he published his last novel Resurrection in order to aid the members of the Dukhobor sect to emigrate to Canada, where they could practise their beliefs freely and without persecution. Finally exasperated by Tolstoy’s blistering satire of a mass in one of its chapters, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him, and so Tolstoy joined the illustrious ranks of Russian apostates – rebels like Stenka Razin and Emelyan Pugachev. Because of his fame, Tolstoy was able to do what few others in Russia could: speak out. The government was powerless to stop him, as it knew there would be international outrage if he was either arrested or exiled. Tolstoy took advantage of the situation by behaving like a ‘holy fool’ so that he could speak frankly to the Tsar about his failure as a national leader. There was a widespread feeling in Russia in the last decade of Tolstoy’s life that he was the ‘real’ Tsar.

Tolstoy lived many lives in the course of his eighty-two years, but there are some noticeable exceptions from the roster of Russian archetypes. He had a longstanding aversion to merchants, for example, who formed a separate class in Russian society, and had a similarly aristocratic disdain for the chinovnik, that representative of the imperial bureaucracy, and the raznochi-nets, the ‘mixed class’ members of the intelligentsia who came from lowly backgrounds and were often radical ‘Westernisers’, anxious to fight for social reform. Tolstoy was also no ‘Oblomov’ – the Russian bear who is Goucharov’s most famous fictional character, and who takes several chapters to get out of bed. Despite all his efforts, Tolstoy failed to acquire that cardinal Russian virtue of humility which Oblomov so effortlessly manifests. And yet there is one life we might add albeit not a Russian one: Tolstoy is seen almost as an honorary Chechen. The small Tolstoy Museum in Starogladkovskaya, the Russian military base where Tolstoy was billeted in the 1850s, was the only museum on Chechen territory not to close during the more recent war with Russia, while the national museum in Grozny was desecrated. The statue of Tolstoy in front of the museum also remained unscathed.

The Chechens admire Tolstoy for making friends with them during his time in the Caucasus (this was indeed highly unusual for Russian officers, who tended to treat the natives with contempt), and for writing about them in a positive light. According to Tolstoy’s great-great-grandson Vladimir Ilych, who became director at the Yasnaya Polyana Museum in 1994, ‘The Chechen people think that Tolstoy wrote most truthfully of the events that happened then and the character of the mountain peoples, their striving to be independent, for freedom, and their religious, ethnic and other particularities’. Salavdi Zagibov, who succeeded his father as director of the Starogladkovskaya Tolstoy Museum in 2008, has also noted the similarities between the pacifist teachings of Tolstoy and the nineteenth-century Sufi leader Sheikh Kunta Khadji, a Chechen shepherd.⁹ The Starogladkovskaya Museum was reopened in December 2009 after renovation, which was funded by the personal foundation of Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya.

While Tolstoy is universally regarded as one of the world’s great writers, he remains a controversial and contradictory figure. His marriage had already gone into a steep decline by the time he met Vladimir Chertkov, but it was his submission to his devoted friend which caused a bad situation to disintegrate entirely in the last year of his life. Chertkov’s influence over Tolstoy’s estate meant that his version of events initially prevailed over dissenting voices, chiefly that of the writer’s grieving widow, whom he had displaced in her husband’s affections. The publication in 2006 of a collection of scholarly articles dedicated to her memory, and in 2010 of the first Russian biography of Sofya Tolstaya, is witness to the sea-change in attitudes that swiftly took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union.¹⁰

Sonya can be forgiven for becoming paranoid and hysterical in the last year of her husband’s life. She can be forgiven a lot, as her husband treated her very badly, by any account. His strengths were also his weaknesses, and his attitude towards the female gender is in general not admirable. Sonya did not, like him and their daughters, become vegetarian, nor did she want to dispense with money and private property; she just wanted to maintain the comfortable lifestyle she was used to. Sonya was a talented woman who selflessly put aside whatever interests she might have developed in order to go on bearing the children her husband wanted, and help him as his copyist. For long years she supported a man whose ego often blinded him to the needs of his family, and it was unfair of him to expect her to follow him meekly on his quest to lead a more spiritually enlightened, ascetic life just because he decided it was time to change. She also had her faults, however, and her rigidity stopped her from seeing that she could be just as controlling as Chertkov.

Tolstoy has had his share of detractors. One of the most eloquent and witty is Alexander Boot, an admirer of Tolstoy the artist, but also the author of an effective hatchet job on Tolstoy the thinker:

He wished to be more than a novelist, even one of genius. He wished to be more than a seer or a soothsayer, although that would have been a good start. He wished to be God … He wanted to correct God’s mistakes in having allowed the world to become imperfect and sinful. He, Count Tolstoy … set out to usurp God’s job. But the job was already taken, and the deity stubbornly hung on to it. Therefore Tolstoy declared war on God and fought it with every means at his disposal. Alas, though he tried many lines of attack, each disguised by the camouflage of pseudo-Christian verbiage, Tolstoy came off a poor second. By way of revenge, he came, in effect, to deny God the Father, ignore God the Son and dismiss God the Holy Spirit. No one was allowed to defeat Tolstoy and get away with it.¹¹

Boot concedes Tolstoy’s enormous impact on many of the movements of the modern age, such as vegetarianism, anti-capitalism and animal rights, and his arguments are persuasive, yet they need to be squared with the fact that Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-violence was revered by Gandhi, Wittgenstein and Martin Luther King. To see Tolstoy principally in terms of artist versus thinker, moreover, is to overlook his important humanitarian work.

It is perhaps Tolstoy’s impact on Russian life while he was still alive which is his greatest legacy beyond his great fictional works. If for nothing else, Tolstoy should be hailed for trying to improve literacy in a country where only a tiny percentage of the population could read and write at the end of the nineteenth century, for doing something about the national disaster threatened by famine, and for having the courage to speak some home truths to a complacent and corrupt regime which was indifferent to the poverty of its subjects. Numerous people approached Tolstoy with scepticism, but came away, like Diaghilev, convinced of his sincerity. Even if some of his sons did their best to practise the opposite of what he preached, his daughters were devoted to him. And there is something touching about his untiring zest for life, however wrong-headed his ideas were.

The greatest task facing the biographer of Tolstoy is the challenge of making sense of a man who was truly larger than life. It was a task he himself took on the moment he started writing a diary in his late adolescence, and one he never abandoned, particularly in his last years. Tolstoy never stopped trying to make sense of himself in his writing, whether it was through the public medium of his fictional characters or the quasi-private one of his diary entries. Indeed, as the scholar Irina Paperno has suggested, he even seems to have wanted to extend the extraordinary feat he achieved in his fiction of articulating latent as well as overt psychological processes by ‘turning himself into a book’ in his diaries.¹² If encompassing and describing his consciousness as it evolved was a project doomed to failure, like so many Russian utopian dreams, its very lack of finitude nevertheless reassures us of Tolstoy’s humanity.

The task of charting his artistic and intellectual journey has also proved a daunting one for Russia’s great Tolstoy scholars. It is indicative that the mammoth multi-volume biography which Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev embarked on in the 1950s is modestly titled Materials for a Biography. It remained unfinished at his death at the age of eighty-five in 1967, when his pupil Lidiya Gromova-Opulskaya took up the baton. Although she added a further two volumes to Gusev’s four, she also died before the project could be completed, leaving the last eighteen years of Tolstoy’s life still to be covered (before this distinguished scholar’s death in 2003 she launched the new definitive hundred-volume edition of Tolstoy’s Complete Collected Works).¹³ While there is a paucity of sources concerning Tolstoy’s early life, necessitating reliance on the sometimes erratic and incomplete memoirs the writer compiled in old age, the sheer abundance of sources on his last years create problems for the biographer of a different kind. Such was his fame that many episodes in the ‘hagiography’ of Lev Tolstoy were set down while he was not just still alive, but comparatively young: the first biography was published when he was in his early sixties, in German moreover. The innumerable cliches which cling to Tolstoy’s vita – ‘great writer of the Russian land’, ‘the Elder of Yasnaya Polyana’ – can also be inhibiting, as can be the many contradictions with which his personality bristles. Tolstoy’s life is rich and fascinating but also deeply mythologised, and he himself contributed to the process of mythologisation.

In the early years of his marriage, while he was writing War and Peace, Tolstoy would insist that his young wife was present, and so Sonya would usually curl up by his feet on the bearskin rug next to his desk – a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions.¹⁴ Later on he worked in seclusion, but all through their married life, the Tolstoys read each other’s diaries, which meant their confessions could never really be private. In Sonya’s case, it was in the letters she wrote to her sister Tanya that she wrote most frankly; her diary was often written with a high degree of self-consciousness. For Tolstoy, however, who was always deeply connected to the land and those who worked it, there was from the beginning that very Russian yearning for oneness, to the extent that the borders between public and private eventually became blurred. His was a Russian life.

1

ANCESTORS: THE TOLSTOYS AND THE VOLKONSKYS

[T]he extraordinary beauty of spring this year in the countryside would wake the dead. The warm breeze at night making the young leaves on the trees rustle, the moonlight and the shadows, the nightingales below, above, further off and nearby, the frogs in the distance, the silence, and the fragrant, balmy air – all this happening suddenly, not at the usual time, is very strange and good. In the morning there is again the play of light and shade in the tall, already dark-green grass from the big, thickly covered birch trees on the avenue, as well as forget-me-nots and dense nettles, and everything – above all the swaying of the birch trees on the avenue – is just the same as it was when I first noticed and started to love its beauty sixty years ago.

Letter to Sofya Tolstaya, Yasnaya Polyana, 3 May 1897¹

‘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.

Tolstoy was committed to truth in his fiction, but for some reason he never submitted his family history to the razor-edged rational analysis he applied to most other things. Thus he continued to believe into his dotage that his family was descended from a German immigrant called Dick. Amongst the books in his library were four volumes tracing the genealogies of Russia’s most important aristocratic families,⁸ and Tolstoy believed what he read there – that his earliest ancestor came to Russia in the Middle Ages, and that his surname was simply a translation of dick, which means ‘fat’ in German.⁹ This is what Tolstoy often told foreign visitors who were curious to know about his family’s history,¹⁰ and this is what was reproduced in the earliest biographies of the great writer. Evgeny Solovyov, for example (whose biography went on sale for twenty-five kopecks in 1894, when Tolstoy was sixty-six), explained that tolsty, the Russian word for ‘fat’ (stressed on the first syllable) had given rise to Tolstye – ‘the Tolstoys’. From Tolstye had then come Tolstoy, with a stress on the second syllable.¹¹

There is not a scrap of evidence to suggest this putative German immigrant who founded the Tolstoy dynasty ever existed, nor indeed was it ever accepted practice to translate foreign surnames into Russian in old Muscovy. The Tolstoy family’s belief in its German provenance certainly ran deep, however. In the 1840s, ‘Der Dicke’ was what Nicholas I reputedly called General Count Pyotr Alexandrovich Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Nikolayevich who served as ambassador to Paris in the crucial years before the Napoleonic invasion. Maybe the Tsar was hoping to pay the Tolstoy family a compliment by alluding to its German origins, being himself a Germanophile. But perhaps it was just because the venerable count was rather portly.¹²

In another family legend it was supposedly a German called Indros who launched the Tolstoy dynasty. According to Russian annals of genealogy dating back to the seventeenth century, this Indros migrated from the Holy Roman Empire with two sons and 3,000 men in 1352, settled in Chernigov, changed his name to Leonty and converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Tolstoy’s former secretary Nikolay Gusev wondered with good reason, however, how this feudal lord and his enormous retinue could have managed safely to cover hundreds of miles and cross several states usually at war with each other. Why did they attempt such a journey in the first place, and why should they have chosen the politically insignificant Chernigov as their destination? There is also the inconvenient fact that bubonic plague was raging in Rus in the mid-fourteenth century, as elsewhere in Europe, which was hardly an incentive to the pioneering spirit.¹³ Tolstoy’s grandson Sergey Mikhailovich, who also subscribed to the peculiarly resilient family myth about its German origins, complicated the issue by suggesting Indris was actually a Flemish count called Henri de Mons who set off for Russia after an unsuccessful expedition to Cyprus.¹⁴ It does at least seem probable, however, that the Tolstoys could trace their lineage to this fabled progenitor’s great grandson Andrey Kharitonovich, who brought the family to Moscow in the early fifteenth century and whose corpulence earned him the nickname which in time gave rise to the family’s illustrious surname.

In 1682, when the old feudal hierarchical system was abolished, Russian noble families rushed to register their genealogy with the state in order to legitimise their claim to noble status. Another fact which casts doubt on the theory that the Tolstoys were descended from German immigrants is that nearly all the families who registered their genealogy claimed foreign ancestry (most of which was completely spurious), in the hope of enhancing their position, and also their standing with the Tsar.¹⁵ One of the six signatories who submitted the Tolstoys’ early family history to the Russian heraldry office in Moscow in 1686 was the court servant Pyotr Andreyevich, who a few decades later would become the first Count Tolstoy. Pyotr Andreyevich was an exceptional individual, and the first Tolstoy to enter the history books, and he clearly also had creative talent, as he probably invented the story about his earliest ancestors, in which case the family talent for writing fiction can also be traced back several centuries.

Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (1645–1729) led a remarkable life. A man of immense energy, with a brilliant mind, he was also known to be treacherous, switching his political allegiance to the young Peter the Great soon after the latter wrested power from his half-sister Sofia in 1689. Pyotr Andreyevich played his cards skilfully. By 1697, at the age of fifty-two, and already a grandfather, he had demonstrated sufficient loyalty to be sent by Tsar Peter to Italy to study navigation and ship-building, along with many other scions of noble families. One of them was his near contemporary Boris Petrovich Sheremetev, who was rather higher up on the social ladder and travelled with an enormous retinue, including a scribe. Pyotr Tolstoy, by contrast, was accompanied by one soldier and one servant, and he wrote his own diary, which provides a far more interesting and informative account of Italian life seen through Russian eyes.

During his year and four months away, Pyotr Andreyevich travelled the length and breadth of Italy from Venice to Bari, and was able to study Italian life and social customs in some detail. Since he had come from ‘Holy Mother Moscow’, where secular culture was thin on the ground, it is not surprising to find a great deal of attention in his diary devoted to the Church. Pyotr Andreyevich came back to Moscow erudite and beardless, however, and the sight of a Russian Orthodox Christian without a beard probably shocked many of his contemporaries (the foundation of St Petersburg was still a few years off). Pyotr Tolstoy was one of the first Russians to don Western dress in the last years of old Muscovy. Years before Peter the Great began the wholesale import of Western culture into Russia, he could boast an impressive knowledge of European letters, as well as exquisite manners.¹⁶

In 1701, seeing his brilliant diplomatic potential, Peter appointed Pyotr Andreyevich as Russia’s first ambassador to Constantinople. It was a tall order to hope to improve relations with the Sublime Porte, which fought three wars against Russia during the reign of Peter the Great alone, and Pyotr Tolstoy spent the last years of his posting languishing in the Yedikule (‘Seven Towers’) Fortress – the dungeon where foreign ambassadors whose countries were at war with the Ottoman Empire were traditionally incarcerated. But Tolstoy was clearly a restless man who needed to be engaged on something. Either before or after Sultan Ahmed III declared war in 1710, he drew on the knowledge of Latin he had acquired during his time in Italy to produce the first Russian translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

By the time Pyotr Tolstoy returned to Russia in 1714, Peter the Great had not only founded St Petersburg, but made it his new capital. Tolstoy accompanied the Tsar on further foreign trips, and then in 1717 was entrusted with the most delicate and challenging of missions. He was to go to Naples and persuade Peter’s errant son Alexey, the heir to the throne, to return to Russia. Hostile to his father’s reforms, Alexey had sought refuge in Vienna with his brother-in-law Emperor Charles VI, who stationed him out of harm’s way in Naples in order to avert a diplomatic crisis. Pyotr Andreyevich had to resort to nefarious means, employing guile and cunning, and a great deal of disinformation, but his mission was successful. Upon his return to Russia the tsarevich Alexey was immediately thrown into the dungeon of the St Peter and Paul Fortress and interrogated for treason; he died soon afterwards.

Pyotr Tolstoy also took part in the interrogation. He did not endear himself to the Russian population at large, but was showered with riches by the grateful Tsar, who decorated him, appointed him senator and gave him extensive lands. By the time he was made a count, on the day of the coronation of Peter’s wife Catherine I as Empress in 1724, the year before the Tsar’s death, Pyotr Andreyevich was one of the most powerful men in Russia. But his machinations to ensure that Catherine’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded her were to be his undoing. Following Catherine’s death in 1727, Tolstoy’s rival Menshikov had him arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. At the age of eighty-two, Pyotr Andreyevich was sentenced to death and summarily shorn of his title, his decorations and his lands. Shortly before his execution, Tolstoy’s sentence was commuted to life exile in the Solovetsky Monastery prison, which was located on an island near the Arctic Circle. It was a month’s journey away, and he was escorted there, as befitted his rank, by some 100 soldiers, first by land up to the port of Arkhangelsk, and then across the freezing waters of the White Sea. Here Tolstoy was kept in solitary confinement, forbidden to engage in correspondence, and only allowed out, in irons, to attend church services.

The Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea had been founded in the fifteenth century by two Stakhanovite monks who regarded life in a normal cloister too easy an option. They had sought instead a life of the utmost physical privation in emulation of the desert ascetics of early Christianity and found it on ‘Solovki’, the remote Solovetsky islands, where there is no daylight in deepest winter. The piety of the monastery’s founding forefathers stood in stark contrast to the barbarity of Ivan the Terrible, who saw nothing untoward in establishing a prison in its sacred grounds. With its harsh climate, it was a particularly bleak place to serve a sentence. Pyotr Andreyevich’s son Ivan, who accompanied him into exile, died the year after they arrived. Within eight months, Pyotr Andreyevich was also dead.

A century and a half later, in the 1870s, their descendant Lev Tolstoy became fascinated by this chapter of his family history while planning a novel set in the times of Peter the Great. Writing to his friend and relative Alexandra Andreyevna Tolstaya in June 1879, when he was making notes on the case in the Moscow archive of the Ministry of Justice, he declared that the exile of Pyotr and Ivan was the ‘darkest episode’ in the lives of their ancestors. For him, the time of Peter the Great was the ‘beginning of everything’, and he became so interested in Pyotr Andreyevich’s fate that he thought seriously for a while about visiting his place of exile that summer, in the hope of finding out more about him.¹⁷ By this time the monastery had become one of the most sacred places in Russia (and was attracting around 20,000 pilgrims each year),¹⁸ but in the 1870s it was still not an easy place to get to. Tolstoy heard more about Solovki at this time from a peasant storyteller from northern Russia who shared with him the popular legend of the Three Elders.

In 1886, as part of his mission to provide the masses with high-quality reading matter, Tolstoy reworked the story for a popular weekly journal. It is a typically subversive work, in keeping with the ideas he had begun to develop at the time. The story is about the events which take place during a journey to the monastery on one of the boats ferrying pilgrims to the islands from Arkhangelsk. A bishop asks to be set down on an island inhabited by three legendary ‘holy men’ whom he wants to meet. To his consternation, their modest, unconventional and practical Christianity proves to contain more holiness than the ‘official’ Church dogma he tries to inculcate them with. The bishop is humbled by his meeting with the Three Elders. Such provocative ideas caused Tolstoy to become the Russian government’s greatest threat. He was so determined to expose the lies and hypocrisy he saw embedded in the fabric of the tsarist system that he positively hoped he could emulate his ancestor Pyotr Andreyevich, but the government refused to allow him to become a martyr. Alexander III once famously remarked, ‘Tolstoy wants me to exile him to Solovki, but I am not going to give him the publicity.’¹⁹ After the 1917 Revolution Solovki became one of the Soviet Union’s most notorious concentration camps, and it is grimly ironic that some of Tolstoy’s followers ended up there in 1930 simply for refusing to give up their beliefs about non-resistance to violence and the abolition of private property.²⁰

Fourteen children were born to Tolstoy and his wife Sonya during their long marriage, but Lev Nikolayevich was not the first Tolstoy to have so many offspring. Pyotr Andreyevich’s eldest son Ivan had five sons and five daughters before he died in the Solovetsky prison at the age of forty-three in 1728, and the second son was Andrey Ivanovich (1721–1803). This was Tolstoy’s great-grandfather, about whom not much is known beyond the fact that he was christened ‘Big Nest’ because he had twenty-three children, twelve of whom reached adulthood.²¹ Tolstoy’s aunt once told him that Andrey Ivanovich had married at such a young age that he apparently burst into tears when his equally young wife Alexandra went to a ball one evening without saying goodbye to him.²²

In 1741 Catherine I’s daughter Elizabeth finally became Empress, as Pyotr Andreyevich had hoped, and at some point in her reign, she returned one of the Tolstoy family estates to his son Ivan Petrovich’s widow. In 1760 the remaining properties and Pyotr Andreyevich’s title were finally restored.²³ It would have been at this time that the Tolstoy family crest was designed, consisting of a shield supported by two borzoi dogs, signifying loyalty and swiftness in attaining results. The shield, divided into seven segments, features at its centre a crossed gold sword and a silver arrow running through a golden key, as a symbol of the family’s long history. In the top left-hand corner is half of the Russian imperial eagle, and next to it on a silver background is the blue St Andrew Cross which Pyotr Andreyevich was awarded in 1722. In the bottom right-hand corner the seven towers topped with crescents recall Pyotr Andreyevich’s incarceration in Constantinople’s Yedikule Fortress, and his role in securing Russian victory over the Turks.²⁴

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