Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Tolstoy was not unique in being fascinated by these curious figures, but perhaps, because of his aunt’s spiritual predilections, he was exposed to rather more contact with them than were other boys of his class. Grisha, the yurodivy (holy idiot) whom he described in Childhood, was one such: filthy, wild-eyed, misshapen and incoherent. Grisha was in fact a made-up character, a composite of many different tramps who must have arrived at Yasnaya Polyana during Tolstoy’s childhood. In old age, he recalled that he had been less impressed by any of the professional holy fools than by an actual idiot, a gardener’s boy, whom he overheard praying in a hot-house adjoining the drawing room, ‘and who really amazed me by his prayer, in which he spoke to God as if he were a living person. “You are my doctor, you are my apothecary,” he said with impressive conviction.’17

  We can be sure that his aunt Alexandra (who was so holy that she did not wash, and gave off ‘a specific acid smell’) imparted her piety to the children. His favourite Bible story was that of Joseph and his brethren, the story of a younger son being cast out by his brothers and sold into a strange land, and then, when he is reunited with them in grown-up life, being able to lord it over them and being able to reward them with grain and gold and treasures. The appeal to the young orphan of this tale is obvious; likewise, the appeal of a story in which a ‘dreamer’ and an idler manages to make a worldly success out of his inner life. Every novelist who has enjoyed great popularity and success must have tasted the rewards of Pharaoh’s house.

  Not that the Bible could have as great a role in the upbringing of an Orthodox child as it did in that of a western Protestant. It was only in 1818, ten years before Tolstoy’s birth, that there existed a New Testament in modern Russian as opposed to Old Church Slavonic. An English child of the period, for its religious instruction, would have very little besides the Bible, the Catechism and perhaps (in the stricter households) Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. But a little Russian boy could feast his imagination on twinkling lamps, dark icons, and muttered prayers at home; in church, on the great sense of everyone praying together, rich and poor alike, standing in the body of the church, lighting tapers, bowing, crossing themselves, and joining in the chanting of the voluntary choir. In an Orthodox liturgy, unlike anything seen in the West, we witness the whole people of God doing their liturgy together, the doll-like priest, a bearded figure stiff in vestments, doing his stuff behind the screen, and only appearing from time to time, to bless, to exhort or to distribute the Sacrament. In all this, there is not much exercise of the intellect. There are no analytical sermons, as there might have been in Scotland or Switzerland or France. Probably the priest is barely literate. It was not a Church which had produced as many great scholars as the Churches of the West, and its attitude to knowledge was, by the standards of Western Europe, obscurantist and superstitious. But it had produced saints.

  Tolstoy’s aunt Alexandra cannot have failed to tell him the stories of the saints and heroes of the Russian Church. She would have told him of how the Russian people had been converted to Christianity by Prince Vladimir of Kiev (who died in 1015) inviting the missionaries from Constantinople. Before his conversion, Vladimir was a lecher, a drunkard, and a soldier. After his baptism, he abandoned his habits of feasting and rich living, and lived among the poor, opening his gates to invalids and beggars. He who had previously shed blood so freely in battle became convinced that it was wicked to take human life. Throughout his great dominions, he abolished the death penalty for criminals, and when the Greek bishops told him that he was wrong to do so, he remained convinced that torture and capital punishment had no place in a Christian kingdom.

  Nor can she have failed to tell her nephews about the sons of Prince Vladimir, Boris and Gleb, the first two canonised saints of the Russian Church. When Vladimir died, his eldest son, Svyatopolk, tried to get rid of his other brothers and become the sole ruler of Russia. First he attacked Prince Boris, his younger brother, who was leading a detachment of his father’s troops. But Boris believed the words of Our Lord that it is wrong to resist violence with violence, and he allowed himself to be butchered by Svyatopolk. By his action (for Svyatopolk wanted only his death) Boris spared the lives of all his troops. A few days later another brother, Gleb, followed Boris’s example. ‘The story of Boris and Gleb shows that the seeds of the Christian religion fell on fertile soil in Russia, and that the nation accepted wholeheartedly the new teaching. It also reveals that Christianity was understood by Russian people neither as a system of doctrines, nor as an institution, but primarily as a way of life.’18

  These stories sank into Tolstoy’s consciousness as a child, but they can hardly have been more vivid to him than the fact of death. When he was nine and his father died, Tolstoy tells us, he found it impossible to believe that Count Nikolay Ilyich no longer existed. When walking the streets of Moscow he stared at every stranger that he passed, hoping that it would be his father – a detail which he later used when little Seryozha was missing his mother Anna Karenina. His father’s non-existence was imaginatively unabsorbable; not so God’s. When, at about this time, a schoolfriend of his brother’s told them that he had made a great discovery, they all gathered round to hear. This child, Volodenka Milyutin, was a sage twelve year old studying at the Gymnasium near the Tolstoy house in Moscow. In the course of his studies, the secret had been revealed to him, that God does not exist. Everything, moreover, that grown-ups taught about Him was a mere fiction. The Tolstoy brothers debated the matter, and decided that, on balance, what Milyutin had told them was true. The non-existence of God does not seem to have disconcerted them particularly. Perhaps if Aunt Alexandra had lived longer, she might have influenced the children to be more conventionally pious. Perhaps not. A figure who was much closer to all the children, and in particular to Tolstoy himself, was a distant kinswoman, Tatyana Alexandrovna Yergolskaya.

  In his earliest memory of her, she was already over forty. ‘She must have been very attractive, with her enormous plait of crisp, black, curly hair, her jet-black eyes and vivacious, energetic expression. . . .’ he wrote. Then he drew back. ‘I never thought about whether she was beautiful or not.’ The hero of Resurrection, Nekhlyudov, looks at a portrait of his mother in the room where she died. He is sickened by the particular care with which the painter has depicted the outline of her breasts, and the cleavage between them showing over the low-cut gown. There was something revolting and blasphemous to him about contemplating his mother as a half-nude painter’s beauty. ‘It was the more disgusting that, in this very room three months since, this woman had lain, dried up like a mummy, and at the same time filling, with an excruciatingly oppressive smell which nothing would stifle, not just the room, but the whole house.’19 Even ‘innocent’ images of maternity in Tolstoy are complicated by feelings of sex and death. Cultures more highly-charged than our own need to be tasted for Tolstoy’s youthful psyche to come into focus. (Was it St. Aloysius who was so holy that he would not remain in the same room alone with his mother lest she inflamed him with lust?) Incestuous feelings for the mother he never had were to torment Tolstoy throughout his life.

  Meanwhile, Tatyana Alexandrovna Yergolskaya, the beloved Tante Toinette, provided a mother-substitute. ‘Probably she loved my father and he loved her, but she did not marry him when they were young, because she thought he had better marry my wealthy mother, and she did not marry him subsequently because she did not wish to spoil her pure poetic relations with him and with us.’20

  Family legends harden and ossify. We shall never really know, any more than Tolstoy really knew, what was going on in his father’s heart at the time of his mother’s death. We can be fairly certain that whatever prevented Count Nikolay and Tante Toinette from marrying, it was not the peculiarly Tolstoyan notion that her relations with the children would have been more ‘pure’ and ‘poetic’ had she not shared their father’s bed. We do not even know that she did not. For Tolstoy, it was important to establish his ‘little aunt’s’ purity. Her kisses and caresses we
re reserved for him. It was from her, and perhaps only from her, that he had any displays of physical affection when he was a young child. It was from her that he learnt ‘the spiritual delight of love’. Moreover, as we have already said, she taught him ‘the charm of an unhurried, tranquil life’.

  It is a lesson which any child in that peculiar household would have done well to absorb. But their chances of imbibing it were to be severely cut short. Tatyana was with them all at Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1841 while Aunt Alexandra made one of her frequent visits to the celebrated Kaluga hermitage, an offshoot of the Optina Pustyn monastery which Dostoyevsky was to make famous in The Brothers Karamazov. In August, there came the news that Aunt Alexandra had died there. Tatyana set out for the monastery to arrange the funeral, and the younger children stayed behind in the country with servants and tutors, occupying themselves by building a throne for their dog. (It fell from this contraption and injured its paw.)

  None of them understood at once what the significance of Aunt Alexandra’s death was to be. It was the fourth major death in Tolstoy’s first thirteen years of life, and in terms of his destiny over the next six years, it was the most crucial. The losses of his parents and his grandmother were incalculable. But the loss of his mildly mad aunt Alexandra actually displaced him, his brothers and his sister. It uprooted them from the familiar scenes of Yasnaya Polyana and Moscow, and it wrenched them away from the one person for whom they all felt the warmest affection. For their ‘aunt’ Tatyana was in fact only a very distant relative, and she had no legal right over the children. Their guardianship passed naturally to their father’s only surviving sister, the Countess Pelageya Ilyinichna Yushkova.

  Tolstoy’s eldest brother, Nikolay Nikolayevich, was by now eighteen and acutely aware of the family’s shortage of cash until they attained their majority. He begged their aunt Pelageya (whom none of them really knew) to do what was possible. What the children did not realise was that there were ‘emotional undercurrents’. Years before, Colonel Yushkov, Aunt Pelageya’s incurably womanising husband, had taken a shine to Tatyana Alexandrovna Yergolskaya. He had even, in his bachelor days, proposed to her. For the boy Tolstoy, Aunt Toinette’s love was pure and delightful. His aunt Pelageya had keener, jealous memories of the ‘enormous plait of crisp black curly hair’, and the jet-black flirtatious eyes, which had beguiled both her brother and her husband. It was not something which, even twenty years later, she felt able to live with. The children could come and live with the Yushkovs in Kazan, but Tatyana Alexandrovna (though now of an age when she was unlikely to excite the Colonel into an indiscretion) was to be left behind.

  ‘It is a cruel and barbaric thing to separate me from the children for whom I have cared so tenderly for nearly twelve years,’ she confided in a correspondent.

  Countess Pelageya Ilyinichna was no Miss Murdstone, but the whole thing has the relentless poignancy of a Victorian novel. She and her bluff, jolly husband believed that they were doing the best for the Tolstoy children, as indeed they were. That was just the trouble. The best – at that particular moment – was not what they needed or wanted. The ramshackle and rather crazy grandeur of life under the tutelage of Aunt Alexandra was to be replaced by the moneyed ‘comfort’ of life with her worldly sister. Mud tracks in the country or the pavements of Moscow: now the provincial streets of Kazan. They were leaving behind the lice-infested pilgrims and the religious maniacs with whom one aunt surrounded herself, to encounter another aunt’s powdered flunkeys and socialite nobodies who, because they were in Kazan, were somebodies. The Way of the Pilgrim was sealed off, and Vanity Fair was built in its stead.

  Chapter Two

  Joseph and his Brethren

  1841 – 1847

  Me voilà en Asie!

  Catherine the Great

  Tolstoy lived in Kazan from 1841 to 1847.1 Though there were visits to various family estates during this period, his teens were a kind of exile. Opinions of the place have varied. Catherine the Great, staying there in 1767, had written to Voltaire, ‘Me voilà en Asie!’2 Sergey Aksakov, whose unforgettable schooldays were spent in Kazan, remembered during the winter months, how the ‘ice on the great lake Kaban was the scene of famous encounters with fists between Tartars and Russians. They lived on opposite sides of the lake.’3 Alexander Herzen recalled ‘the veiled faces of the Tartar women, the high cheekbones of their husbands, the mosques of true believers standing side by side with the churches of the Orthodox faith – it all reminds one of the East. At Vladimir or Nizhny the neighbourhood of Moscow is felt; but one feels far from Moscow at Kazan.’4 The most entertaining of English travellers in Russia, Sir D. Mackenzie-Wallace, however, having told us that Kazan was once the capital of an independent Tartar khanatel, later in the century warns that ‘the town as a whole has a European rather than an Asiatic character. If anyone visits it in the hope of getting a “glimpse of the East”, he will be grievously disappointed.’5

  Tolstoy’s paternal grandfather had been the governor of Kazan. Because of its position on the Volga, and its being on the borderlands between European and Asiatic Russia, the two had a certain importance, but it was far from being large, and as Mackenzie-Wallace would remind us, it only seems interesting by comparison with other provincial towns on the Volga.

  At the time of Tolstoy’s residence there, its population was not more than thirty thousand. It was a lively little place, and the aunt and uncle were at the centre of things. If your happiness derived from dinners, card games, masquerades and tableaux-vivants, then the Yushkovs’ was a merry enough household in which to grow up. And, much of the time, Tolstoy did revel in these things. But his adolescence was rendered an agony by shyness, and by the sense that his thick nose and springy hair made him hideously unattractive to girls. There were hours of silent agony in front of the looking-glass, and equally ghastly spells of lust, which tormented him almost from the moment he arrived in Kazan. There was a maid in his aunt’s house called Masha who first aroused him; he was too shy to do anything about it, and shortly after that his brother Sergey introduced him to brothels.

  The brothers Tolstoy, and their sister Marya, remained very much a family, but already the Brotherhood was in evolution and dissolution. Nikolay passed through Kazan University and joined the army. The other two brothers provided Lev Nikolayevich with contrasting influences. Sergey was a worldling. With him you could drink and dance and talk about sex. Dmitry, the one closest in age to Lev, was at this stage a very different sort of youth. Lev, only about a year his junior, envied Dmitry’s ‘large, dark, serious eyes’, and his ability not only to make girls laugh, but also to impress them with the belief that he was deeply serious. In extreme old age, Tolstoy remembered Dmitry as a Dostoyevskian innocent during the Kazan phase. While Sergey and Nikolay were dissolute and worldly, Dmitry ‘never suffered from the usual vices of youth. He was always serious, thoughtful, pure and resolute, though hot-tempered.’ Like the eldest, Nikolay, Dmitry was quite indifferent to how he was regarded by the rest of the world; he cared nothing for dress, rank, or personal appearance: all the things which really obsessed the adolescent Lev.

  At this stage, the Tolstoys had an extraordinary poor relation called Lyubov Sergeyevna. ‘When I knew her, she was not only pitiable but hideous. I do not know what her illness was, but her face was swollen as if it had been stung by bees. Her eyes were just narrow slits between swollen shiny cushions without eyebrows. Similarly swollen, shiny and yellow were her cheeks, nose, lips and mouth. She spoke with difficulty (having probably a similar swelling in her mouth). In summer, flies used to settle on her face and she did not feel them, which was particularly unpleasant to witness. Her hair was still black but scanty and did not hide her scalp. A bad smell always came from her, and in her little room, the windows of which were never opened, the odour was stifling. And this Lyubov Sergeyevna became Dmitry’s friend. He began to go and listen to her, talk to her and read to her. And we were morally so dense that we only laughed at it, while Dmitr
y was morally so superior, so free from caring about people’s opinion, that he never by word or hint showed that he considered that what he was doing was good. He simply did it. And it was not a momentary impulse but continued all the time we lived in Kazan.’6

  As befitted a Dostoyevskian innocent, Dmitry was profoundly pious, though his piety differed from that of their aunt Pelageya. She (who ended her days as a nun when the Colonel was dead) had particular interest in the stuffs and golden cloths with which the priests were vested, and she was a generous benefactor of churches. Dmitry was fired with the romance of Christ’s poor. His peculiarity first showed itself during his first fast in preparation for Holy Communion. He prepared not at the fashionable University church, but at the prison church. At this church, there was a very pious, strict priest who used during Holy Week to read through the whole of the Gospels – something which is prescribed but seldom done in the Orthodox liturgy. Dmitry used to stand throughout these recitations.

  The church was built so that the prisoners were separated from the rest of the congregation by a glass partition with a door in it. Once, when one of the prisoners wanted to pass something to one of the deacons – either some money or a taper to be lit – nobody would do it for him; but Dmitry ‘with his serious face’ stepped forward and handed it over.

  The image of this prison church was to haunt Tolstoy for ever. It was to inspire his most powerful and tasteless attack on the Orthodox faith, written forty years after Dmitry had died. But for a short time, when he was about sixteen, Tolstoy was inspired by Dmitry to feelings of piety. He confessed his sins, he went to Holy Communion, he wallowed in the rich liturgical atmosphere of the Kazan churches. In addition to the prison church, there were many splendid fanes where the young believer could worship, above all the Cathedral with its three renowned and wonder-working icons of Saints Yury (i.e. George), Varsonofy and Herman. Yet, in spite of the fact that religion was in his bones and blood, his mind was never really very happy with it for long. He tells us that once, on the day of a University exam, he walked near the Black Lake and prayed to God to let him pass the exam. But, nevertheless, while learning the Catechism, ‘I saw clearly that the whole Catechism was false.’