Tolstoy (10 page)

When he came to write his memoirs near the end of his life, Tolstoy refused to recount all his happy childhood memories, both because they were 'endless' and also because he feared it would be impossible to convey adequately to others the memories he cherished which were so important to him.
³⁷
He could recall very few specific events from his early childhood beyond his father coming and going, and the riveting stories he told about the adventures encountered on his hunting expeditions. He remembered only three occasions when something really made an impression on him, but two of these impressions are intriguing. One was when his mother's cousin, one of the Prince Volkonskys, a hussar, came to visit when he was very small and sat him on his knee. In his memoirs Tolstoy writes that the experience of feeling constricted compelled him to try to break loose while the young officer talked over his head to the other adults. This resulted in the hussar holding the young Lev even tighter. The feeling of captivity, of not being free, he writes in his memoirs, so incensed him that he started howling and trying to escape.
³⁸
Tolstoy would spend his life asserting his independence and resisting people's attempts to make him conform.

The other notable impression, made by another relative who visited Yasnaya Polyana, 'the famous American', Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, his uncle-once-removed, was far more positive, and is connected to what Tolstoy defined as the cardinal family trait:
dikost.
This is a word with many meanings, as so often encountered in the Russian language.
Dikost
literally means 'wildness', but it can also convey unsociableness or shyness. In other contexts it can mean weirdness, eccentricity, or absurdity. Tolstoy liked further to define
dikost,
when applying this word to members of his family, as the quality of possessing passion and daring. It was not a noun with negative connotations in his book. For him it denoted originality and independence of thought, as well as the propensity to do the opposite of everyone else. Tolstoy himself certainly went against the grain in almost everything he did as an adult, and even used
dikost
in this vein to describe the radical ideas he wished to apply to education when launching his pedagogical journal in 1862.
³⁹
Tolstoy perceived
dikost
not only in many of his illustrious ancestors, but also in some of his contemporary relatives — even his very prim and proper distant relative, who was a spirited but nevertheless very poised lady-in-waiting at the imperial court. 'You've got the Tolstoyan
dikost
that we all have,' he wrote to Alexandra Andreyevna in 1865. 'It was not for nothing that Fyodor Ivanovich got himself tattooed.'
⁴⁰
Count Fyodor Ivanovich Tolstoy was indeed the wildest Tolstoy of them all: while visiting a Polynesian island in the South Pacific as a young man, he decided to emulate the natives by having his body completely covered in tattoos. Alexandra Andreyevna in turn called her younger relative Lev Nikolayevich 'the roaring lion'
⁴¹
(the word
Lev
in Russian meaning both Leo and lion).

Tolstoy also invested one of his most autobiographical characters with
dikost.
'All you Levins are
diky,
says the sophisticated bon viveur Stiva Oblonsky to his socially awkward but ardent, truth-seeking friend Konstantin Levin in
Anna Karenina
; 'you always do what no one else does.'
⁴²
This is precisely how Tolstoy was perceived by his contemporaries. In 1868 Eugene Schuyler, the newly appointed American consul to Moscow, was discouraged but not deterred from meeting Tolstoy by a society hostess who characterised Tolstoy as 'very shy and very wild'.
⁴³
If it was from his early ancestor Count Pyotr Andreyevich that Tolstoy inherited his capacity for erudition, it was probably from Fyodor Ivanovich, the 'wild' Tolstoy who got himself tattooed all over, that he inherited his independent spirit and physical strength. Young Lev Tolstoy hardly needed fairy tales when there was a relative in his own family whose life story read like an adventure novel — and his own son Sergey was later so captivated that he published a short biography of Fyodor Tolstoy in 1926.
⁴⁴

Fyodor Tolstoy (1782–1846) earned a reputation for wildness at a young age, fighting his first duel at the age of seventeen soon after being commissioned as an officer in the elite Preobrazhensky Guards regiment in St Petersburg. In 1803, four years later, he escaped the confines of military life by securing, against all odds, a berth on Adam von Krusenstern's three-masted British-built sloop
Nadezhda.
The mission was to complete the first Russian round-the-world expedition, along with a sister ship, the Neva.
⁴⁵
After stops in Copenhagen, Falmouth and the Canary Islands, the
Nadezhda
set sail for Cape Horn, and thence for the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, where Fyodor Tolstoy acquired his famous tattoos. By this time, Captain Krusenstern was heartily fed up with the young officer. Unlike the naturalist, the astronomer, the artist and the doctor on board, Fyodor Ivanovich had nothing much to do, and so amused himself by provoking arguments with the crew, just for the sheer hell of it, and carrying out outrageous pranks, such as apparently letting loose an orang-utan (or was it a monkey?) in the captain's cabin. He also got the ship's priest paralytically drunk one day and then glued his beard to the deck with sealing wax. When the
Nadezhda
arrived at the Kamchatka peninsula on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire, before sailing on to Japan, Captain Krusenstern ordered Tolstoy to leave the ship.

Fyodor Tolstoy's life became so shrouded in legend and prurient gossip that it is difficult to establish the veracity of the many stories which circulated about him, or even the facts of his departure from the
Nadezhda.
One story maintained that he had been abandoned on the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific between Kamchatka and Alaska, together with a monkey (or was it an orang-utan?), which he was later forced to eat out of hunger. The monograph of Fyodor Ivanovich which Tolstoy's son Sergey published in 1926 refutes this. Sergey Tolstoy notes that he once had his hair pulled at the age of nine by a monkey when visiting Fyodor Tolstoy's ageing daughter in Moscow in 1872: she always had a monkey as a pet in memory of the original one her father had kept. In his book, Sergey Tolstoy concludes that Fyodor Ivanovich was certainly put ashore, and definitely spent some time with native tribes on Sitka Island in southern Alaska, which was then part of the colony called 'Russian America'. This is how Fyodor Ivanovich came to acquire his nickname of 'Tolstoy the American'.
⁴⁶

In August 1805, two years after leaving St Petersburg, Fyodor Tolstoy arrived back in the Russian capital, having made his way back across Siberia overland. He was promptly arrested and sent to serve for three years in a remote fortress in current-day Savonlinna, 150 miles north of St Petersburg. By risking his life in the Finnish War, against Sweden (Finland was formally annexed by Russia in 1809), Tolstoy was allowed to rejoin the Preobrazhensky Guards, but his nefarious exploits led to more duels and in 1811 he was dismissed from the army. Nevertheless, his swashbuckling spirit led him to volunteer when Napoleon invaded Russia and his bravery during the Battle of Borodino, during which he was wounded, resulted in him being restored to the ranks and decorated. It is not surprising that Fyodor Ivanovich came to Tolstoy's mind when he was writing
War and Peace.
His relative provided him with the initial inspiration for the character of the desperate, fast-living Dolokhov, who shares his name and patronymic, as well his passion for cards.

In keeping with Tolstoyan
dikost,
Fyodor Ivanovich continued to be full of surprises after finally retiring to Moscow post-1812. He gave up fighting duels and gambling, and calmed down. In 1821 he married a gypsy singer (after which he was promptly ostracised by many in Moscow society) and had twelve children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. Tolstoy got to know Fyodor's widow Avdotya and daughter Praskovya in Moscow in the 1840s and 1850s. Fyodor Tolstoy became very pious as he got older, and those who asked to see his tattoos would see him first remove the large icon of St Spiridon, the patron saint of the Tolstoy family, which he wore round his neck, before showing off the brightly coloured bird in the middle of his chest, surrounded by red and blue patterns, and serpents on his arms.

Fyodor Ivanovich had led a colourful life, and it clearly meant a great deal to Tolstoy to have met his notorious ancestor when he was a child. In his memoirs he declares there is much he would have liked to say about this 'extraordinary, lawless, and attractive man', whose handsome, tanned face with thick sideburns extending to the corners of his mouth clearly left an unusually vivid impression on him as a young boy.
⁴⁷
Fyodor Ivanovich had mellowed by the time he visited Yasnaya Polyana in the early 1830s, when he was in his fifties, but he was still eccentric, producing two embroidered lawn handkerchiefs which he claimed would magnetically cure the toothache suffered by Tolstoy's elder brother Sergey.

When Fyodor Ivanovich visited Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was around seven years old. His earliest extant manuscript dates from around this time. The two notebook pages preserved in his archive were his contribution to a journal co-produced with his brothers:

Children's Amusements

Section One
Natural History

Written by C[ount]. L[ev]. N. To[lstoy]: 1835

1. The Eagle
The eagle is king of the birds. They say that a boy started to tease him once, and he grew angry with him and pecked him to death.

2. The Falcon
The falcon is a very useful bird, it catches gazelles. The gazelle is an animal which runs very fast, so dogs cannot catch it; the falcon will swoop down and kill it.

3. The Owl
The owl is a very strong bird, and it cannot see in sunlight. An eagle owl is also an owl. The eagle owl only differs through its tufts.

4. The Parrot
The parrot is a very beautiful bird, its beak hangs down or is like a hook, and it is taught to speak.

5. The Peacock
The peacock is also beautiful, it has blue patches, and its tail is bigger than it is itself.

6. The Humming Bird
The humming bird is a very small little bird, it has a golden beak, it can be white.

7. The Rooster
The rooster is a beautiful bird, its brightly coloured tail hangs downwards, its throat is red, blue and all colours, and its wattle is red. When the Indian rooster sings, it lowers its tail and its throat, which is red, black and all colours, puffs up. The Indian rooster has a different tail to the rooster, the Indian rooster has a tail which is loose.

We know very little else about 'Children's Amusements', and equally little about other literary ventures that the Tolstoy brothers engaged in during the 1830s. When he wrote his memoirs, Tolstoy had only a few distinct early childhood memories of his brothers, who were his first playmates, but there was one event which he remembered his whole life, and which was one of the most important and most cherished of all his memories. When he was about five years old, his beloved eldest brother Nikolay, then about eleven, announced that the secret to human happiness was written on a little green stick which was buried in the woods a short walk from their house. When the secret was revealed, he told his brothers, people would not only be happy, but they would also cease to be ill, and would no longer be angry with each other. At that point everybody would become 'ant brothers' (
muraveinye bratya
). Tolstoy explains in his memoirs that Nikolay must have read something about the Moravian Brethren (the
moravskie bratya).

As the eldest, Nikolay Tolstoy was revered by his brothers, who all used the polite
vy
form of address with him (rather than
ty).
Young Lev admired Nikolay most of all, and describes him in his memoirs as a 'remarkable boy with a keen artistic sensitivity, a vibrant imagination, and a highly developed moral sense, who was kind and good-natured without ever being smug'. The Tolstoy boys were enthralled by the elaborate games and rituals thought up by Nikolay, who one day promised to take them to the mythical 'Fan-faronov mountain' if they carried out to the letter the conditions he set. These included standing in the corner and trying not to think about the white bear, and avoiding seeing a hare for a whole year. In their childhood, the Tolstoy brothers also played at being 'ant brothers' by huddling together in a den created from two chairs, a couple of boxes and some shawls. In his adulthood, Tolstoy would continue to believe fervently in the possibility of the ant brothers' ideal, but writ large, so as to encompass the whole of humanity. In memory of his brother Nikolay, and his aspirations to love and kindness, which he had sought to emulate, Tolstoy requested towards the end of his life to be buried at the spot where the little green stick was supposedly hidden, and this was indeed where he would be laid to rest in November 1910.
⁴⁸

The religious impulse which inspired Tolstoy in the 1880s was strangely not so distant from that which gave rise to the Moravian Brethren. The Moravian Church, which continues to flourish today, dates back to the rebellion against Roman Catholicism mounted by Jan Hus in the late fourteenth century, more than 100 years before Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Hus and his other Czech-speaking followers were based in Bohemia and Moravia, whose Slav populations had been the first to be converted to Eastern Orthodoxy by the Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The 'Hussites' were keen to revive those traditions, as well as rejecting the contemporary practice of indulgences ministered by the Catholic Church, to which the local populations had been forcibly converted when they became subjects of the Austrian Empire. The idea of personal salvation based on the individual's relationship with God was and remains central to the doctrine of the Moravian Church, and Tolstoy would preach something similar many centuries later, when he rebelled against what he perceived as the Orthodox Church's dependence on ritual and superstition. The early Protestants of Bohemia and Moravia were inevitably persecuted during the Counter Reformation, and in the years which followed, their church went underground. Many of their number eventually emigrated to parts of Europe hospitable to Lutheranism, with whose doctrines they had much in common.