Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  But the chief reason why the Government had left him alone is to be found in the reverence which the Russians feel for literary genius. With the reverence, there goes, on behalf of governments, suspicion and fear. The word has power in Russia, which is why its greatest exponents have nearly always ended up behind bars or dying in exile.

  In Tolstoy, successive Tsars and their advisers recognised that they had a literary monument too large to dislodge. He had begun his career gently, with a few semi-autobiographical scenes from childhood, with short stories based on his experience in the army, and with sketches of the suffering at the siege of Sebastopol. His fellow writers, such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Fet and Nekrasov, recognised that a great practitioner had arrived in their midst. But nothing was to prepare the world for his two greatest achievements, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the latter novel, he wrote one of the great love stories of the world. But, in War and Peace, there was something much grander. The novel in fact evolved out of Tolstoy’s purely private preoccupations and fantasies with his own family. But its first episodes had no sooner appeared than his readers knew that he had done something much more. He had created a national epic to which all Russians could respond. In telling the story of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Moscow, Tolstoy had become a national institution. It was a story to which every patriotic Russian could and does respond. In the accuracy of its portraiture, in all its emotional faithfulness, in its abundant vivacity, it is also one of the great works of literature of the world.

  The life of this author is full of contradictions and puzzles. The paradoxes of Tolstoy are numberless. For instance, this most Russian of novelists was almost entirely influenced not by Russians but by English and French writers. His vision of Christianity owes much more to American Quakers and French rationalists than it does to Russian Orthodox spirituality. And yet he believed himself to be speaking, for much of the time, with the authentic voice of the Russian peasant. There have been many who have turned from Tolstoy’s later work – his advocacy of political anarchism, for example, or his condemnation of Shakespeare – with something like hatred. Others, inspired by the Christian simplicity of his later writings, have been disillusioned to discover, upon reading about his life, that the great prophet of peace lived in an atmosphere of domestic hatred perhaps unrivalled in the history of matrimony.

  And yet, for all these contradictions and paradoxes, the sheer stature of Tolstoy is never diminished. The Russian painter who has left us the largest number of portraits of Tolstoy was Ilya Repin. He has also left us various unforgettable prose portraits of the novelist, as well as those which he put on canvas. He spoke of Tolstoy’s towering moral presence, and hypnotic spiritual aura. ‘Often a day or two after a conversation with him when your own mind begins to function independently, you find that you cannot agree with his views, that some of his thoughts, which seemed at the time incontrovertible, now appear improbable. . . .’ For all that, what remained for Repin was the sense of Tolstoy as a giant. Once, when riding with Tolstoy through the woods near his house, Repin saw him with a vision of particular clarity, ‘like Raphael’s God in the vision of Ezekiel, with forking beard and a kind of special grace and agility characteristic of a warrior or a Circassian, manoeuvring among the branches, now pushing aside the twigs with his hand’. What arrested the painter was not just the speed, but a vivacity which was almost divine. Some such awe is only fitting when approaching such a figure. If the portrait which follows is less flattering than a canvas by Repin, it is painted, nevertheless, with no small sense of the subject’s grandeur.

  Chapter One

  Origins

  1828 – 1841

  Бывало, нами дорожили,

  Бывало . . .

  [There was a time when we were highly esteemed; there was a time. . . .]

  Pushkin, My Genealogy

  ‘And on they went, singing “Eternal Memory”. . . .’ Tolstoy’s story begins, like Doctor Zhivago’s, with a woman’s funeral. Only, when Tolstoy’s mother died on August 4, 1830, he was too young to remember her. Born on August 28, 1828, he lost his mother when he was barely two. He could never remember her face, and no portrait of her survives. Both facts are of profound significance in the story of Tolstoy’s inner life.1

  His mother’s name was Marya Nikolayevna Volkonskaya – that is, Mary, the daughter of Nicholas Volkonsky. She was born in 1790, the only child of an eccentric, choleric prince who, at the time of her birth, was eminent in the service of the Empress Catherine the Great. The Volkonskys were an ancient family, who traced their grand descent back to Prince Ryurik. They considered themselves grander than the Romanovs, and Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich had added the distinction of military achievement to that of a noble inheritance. He first rose to prominence in the Turkish campaign of 1780, and in 1793 a successful career in the army was rewarded with the gentler life of the diplomat. He was Russian Ambassador to Berlin in 1793. Prince Nikolay was an outspoken man, and nobody could call him sycophantic in relation to his royal patrons. When Catherine suggested to him that he should marry the ‘niece’ (and mistress) of her stern favourite Potemkin, Volkonsky had replied, ‘What made him think I should marry his whore?’ With the death of Catherine the Great in 1796, his career came to an end.

  Catherine was succeeded by the mad Emperor, Paul, who dismissed Prince Volkonsky from the army for failing to appear at a review.

  Conscious that all his Court were plotting against him, Paul had the classic paranoid tendency to develop particular hatreds for old friends and favourites, whether at Court or in the field of foreign diplomacy. An example of Paul’s military wisdom is his idea, in January 1801, that twenty thousand Cossacks should march from Orenburg to India in order to defeat the British there. A few months after Paul had proposed this scheme, he was strangled by a group of senior army officers and replaced by Alexander I. By then Prince Nikolay Volkonsky had already, for a number of years, been leading a life of retirement, like Yevgeny Onegin’s uncle, quarrelling with the servants, gazing through the windowpanes and squashing flies.

  Tolstoy’s mother had lost her mother when she was two. When he left the army and retired to his country estate one hundred and thirty miles south of Moscow, Prince Volkonsky devoted himself to his young daughter’s education. By then she was seven. A true follower of Catherine the Great, and a son of the Enlightenment, Prince Volkonsky, unlike his grandson, believed both in the education of women and in the superiority of European culture over Russian. They spoke to one another in French, the father and his child. He ensured that she knew German and Italian, and that she had a good grounding in music and history. They read Rousseau together, and works of the French Encyclopaedists. As befitted a former ambassador, who had been given the rank of General by the Emperor Paul before his dismissal, Prince Volkonsky was entitled to keep two armed sentinels. They stood guard, more like toy soldiers, or something in the fantasies of Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, at the towers which flanked the entrance to the estate of Yasnaya Polyana. (The name means ‘Bright Glade’.) Life in the great house became more and more isolated from the world, and from the current of public events. In all observable aspects, Yasnaya Polyana remained in the eighteenth century throughout Prince Nikolay’s days.

  Yasnaya Polyana is a place of great beauty, as the modern tourist can discover. Indeed, as one of Tolstoy’s kinsmen has observed in a recent book, ‘not a little of the attraction of Yasnaya Polyana, at least for its Russian visitors, lies in the solitary physical evocation in the Soviet state of the old manorial way of life, preserved through the chance of Tolstoy’s being not only a great writer, but also the inheritor of an aristocratic demesne’.

  The modern visitor sees a low-lying range of white buildings not dissimilar from the colonial style of architecture to be encountered in Carolina or Virginia. It is set in well-planted, gently undulating countryside. The village still survives, where Tolstoy’s peasants struggled to maintain their existence. Even today, dres
sed up as a show-place for trippers, it feels remote and primitive, though it is not much more than a hundred miles from Moscow and close to the main road.

  As a crow would measure, these shabby houses and hutments are less than a mile from their master’s house, across fields which are still cultivated, and across the abundant orchards. Spiritually, the distance seems almost infinite between these humble abodes and the house, filled as it is with Tolstoy’s extensive library, with a grand piano and portraits of ancestors painted in the western manner. Though by the standards of a European aristocratic house, Yasnaya Polyana is austere, it remains most distinctly the house of a European aristocrat. And yet we do not feel, as we might when visiting a castle on the Loire or the Rhine, that this is part of the landscape it inhabits. Even in the days when Russia was full of manorial estates and rich houses, they must have seemed like islands in an alien sea.

  All around the Europeanised house (which is only a wing of the mansion inhabited by Tolstoy’s grandfather Volkonsky) stretches the land which was to exercise so strong a hold on the novelist. Here are the abundant birchwoods which in spring and summer have a feathery, delicate green against which the house looks particularly splendid. In winter, everything seems white – the barks of the trees, the house itself, the snow-covered fields and paths, the frozen ponds and lakes. You feel something more than just the close physical proximity of nature in this place. More, there is this sense of displacement, of incompatibility between house and land, as though the pretensions and claims of civilised man would inevitably, in the face of nature, break down. Who could be said to own these trees, these pieces of ice, these fields? These were questions which were to haunt the young heir of Yasnaya Polyana, Lev Tolstoy.

  For any reader of War and Peace, however, the place has an instantly recognisable quality as well. We feel as much at home as in any place which a writer has encapsulated in imaginative form. Just as it might be impossible to travel through certain bits of Civil War country without being reminded of Faulkner’s The Unvanquisbed, so at Yasnaya Polyana we are instantaneously transported to the ‘Bald Hills’ of Tolstoy’s greatest novel.

  It was here, at Yasnaya Polyana, that Tolstoy’s grandfather pursued the legendarily bad-tempered existence which Tolstoy was to mythologize in War and Peace. Tolstoy changed just one letter of his grandfather’s name – a V to a B – when ‘inventing’ the figure of Prince Bolkonsky. In his early appearances in that novel there is something very grand about Prince Bolkonsky: ‘Everyone sitting in the ante-chamber experienced the same feeling of respect and even terror when the enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather small old man, with powdered wig, little withered hands, and bushy grey eyebrows which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his clever, youthfully glittering eyes.’2

  Much of the Bald Hills drama, in the initial stages of War and Peace, revolves around the Mr. Woodhouseish question of whether a selfish old man can spare his daughter’s hand in matrimony. ‘Life without Princess Marya, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to him. “And why should she marry?” he thought. “To be unhappy for sure. . . .”’3 All this has small enough importance in terms of the book’s plot, but the personal significance for Tolstoy is obvious. In depicting her in his novel, he changed one letter in his mother’s surname, and left her Christian name unaltered. What he was contemplating, in the grand military sweep of his epic, were huge questions such as the causes of war and peace, the rise and fall of empires, the past of Europe, the future of Russia. But, as he reconstructed Prince Bolkonsky’s selfish reflection, Tolstoy was contemplating the (to him) no less important historical mystery of his own birth.

  Tolstoy never saw his Volkonsky grandfather. The old man died in 1821, leaving his daughter a spinster – by now thirty-one years old and unmarried. Worried about the inheritance, she suggested, in a general sort of way, to the rest of the family that she might marry a cousin, Prince Mikhail Alexandrovich Volkonsky. Nothing came of this idea. Prince Mikhail got married to someone else in Moscow that April, and Princess Marya attended the ceremony. There she met a less eligible bachelor, Prince Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy, five years her junior, and the two families immediately entered into discussions with their lawyers. A marriage was arranged and shortly took place. If Princess Marya intended to have heirs, there was some element of hurry. They were married on July 9, 1822. Her dowry was eight hundred male ‘souls’, serfs in the Tula and Oryol districts, and the estate of Yasnaya Polyana.

  Count Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy was an ex-army officer. His father was the governor of Kazan, a town four hundred miles to the east of Moscow, and the old man’s financial affairs were so chaotic that Nikolay had felt obliged to leave the army, lest at any point he might be shamed into admitting that he was too poor to buy himself further promotion. (He was a lieutenant-colonel when he resigned his commission.) Marriage to a rich woman was the obvious answer to his difficulties and, since the Tolstoys were also an ancient and highly esteemed Russian family,4 the Volkonskys agreed to the match.

  The Tolstoys had five children: Nikolay, Sergey, Dmitry, Lev and lastly a daughter, Marya, who was born in March 1830. Princess Marya never really recovered from this confinement, and died five months later.

  Tolstoy died seven years before the revolution of the proletariat; he was born three years after the revolution of the nobility. It is almost as if he was cocooned between the two revolutions, that of December 1825 and that of October 1917. There had been assassinations and palace revolutions in plenty throughout the history of the Romanov royal house, but the uprising on December 14, 1825 was different in kind. It has been called ‘the first truly political movement ever to be directed against the established system’ in Russia.5 It was a political movement with wide adherence, and a history dating back a decade. The first formal structure taken by the would-be reformers was the foundation in 1816 of the Union of Salvation or Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. This was a group of Guards officers, inspired by the ideas and events of the previous thirty years in Europe, who dreamed of converting the absolutist autocracy of the Russian Emperor into an enlightened constitutional monarchy, advised by assemblies. The dreamers, or conspirators, were wildly different in their views and aims, which was one reason for their failure. Some looked to England as an ideal model, to a country really governed by an aristocratic oligarchy, but retaining the ancient forms of monarchy and religion. Others looked to France, its Revolution, its commitment to a republic. Some were Freemasons, or dabblers in the new and cranky creeds which from time to time caught the imagination of the St. Petersburg salons. Some of the conspirators wanted to emancipate the serfs, though they were not all agreed on what terms. But their movement seems by the standards of later revolutionary movements amateurish and dilettante. Their plots were, as Pushkin said, hatched between claret and champagne to the accompaniment of satirical songs and friendly arguments.

  Their opportunity for action was given to them upon the death of Alexander I in Taganrog on November 19, 1825. The questions arose: should he be succeeded by the second Imperial brother, Constantine, at that moment in Warsaw, or by the third, the Grand Duke Nicholas? Alexander I had, in 1822, declared Nicholas (who had a son, and who was loyal to Orthodoxy) to be his heir rather than Constantine. This was because Constantine, after a long exile, was imagined by friends and enemies alike to have a number of ‘liberal’ views that in all probability he never possessed. The Northern and Southern Societies of conspirators, whose activities were of course known to the Imperial police, declared themselves in favour of Constantine’s succession, but they had less than a month in which to popularise their point of view in the ranks of the army. The military was the chief source of their strength; not only were the majority of them officers, but the Grand Duke Nicholas was in any case unpopular with the army. On December 14, the Grand Duke was declared Tsar Nicholas I, and the army reviewed on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The day was a war of nerves between the new Empe
ror and his army. It seemed as though some three thousand troops had come out in favour of revolution, leaving about nine thousand loyal to the new regime. There were exciting moments, as when old Alexander Yakubovich, a veteran of the Caucasus, paraded in front of the mutinying troops and cried, ‘Constantine and a Constitution!’; but, when the orders were given for the Moscow regiment to load, the old hero developed a violent headache and was nowhere to be found. The Governor-General of St. Petersburg was sent out to reason with the mutineers and was shot dead. Then followed the Metropolitan Serafim, splendid in cope and the crown-like mitre of the Eastern Church. The rebels told him to go back into the cathedral and pray for their souls. Finally, the Grand Duke Michael tried to plead with them, and they told him to return to the Winter Palace since he was endangering his life. But, by the end of the day, Nicholas I’s patience had run out. He ordered his troops to fire on the rebels, and they fled without putting up any resistance. For the next thirty years, the Russian Empire was to be dominated by this huge and ferocious despot, who devoted himself to a confident and calculated policy of reaction against the faintly liberalising trends of Alexander I.