Tolstoy (37 page)

As Sonya later emphasised, her husband's work was always the most important thing in his life,
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and she would later actually reprove him for his neglect of the younger children when he became a full-time campaigner on behalf of the oppressed. He was the one to make all the decisions about how the children would be educated, however, and was a charismatic figure when they were growing up, all the more so because they saw him less. It was in the 1870s that Tolstoy was most active and involved as a father, particularly in the first half of the decade, before he became swept up by the writing of
Anna Karenina
and the spiritual crisis which immediately followed it. The elder Tolstoy children consequently received considerably more attention from their father than their younger siblings who grew up in the 1880s, as would become apparent in the case of Andrey and Misha, who later showed no interest whatsoever in living according to their father's teachings. The younger Tolstoy children also grew up with no memory of their parents being happily married, unlike the three eldest, who as adults all wrote revealing memoirs of their idyllic early years at Yasnaya Polyana.
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Even though the Tolstoy children saw less of their father than their mother, his influence was certainly greater when they were young: his word was law. When they were very young, it was always an event whenever he appeared in the nursery, and throughout their childhood they cherished the times he spent with them. In the 1870s the Tolstoy children remembered their father still being full of joie de vivre, and somehow life became more interesting for them when he was present, as he seemed to possess a special energy. He hated to be disturbed while he was working, and insisted on complete peace and quiet, but at other times he was often in high spirits, with the exuberance of an overgrown child himself. As an aficionado of physical exercise and the benefits of being outdoors in the fresh air, he enjoyed taking his children riding, swimming and skating. Tolstoy was particularly keen that his sons take up gymnastics, but he was not at all keen on toys, which were banished from the nursery, forcing Sonya to produce horses and dogs out of cardboard, and sew rag-dolls herself so the children had something to play with. Tolstoy compensated for depriving his children of conventional playthings by granting them the greatest possible liberty. What he hated most of all in his children were lies and rudeness, and to see them eating from their knife; he punished their misdemeanours by simply ignoring them. The Tolstoy children found it impossible to lie to their father, and sometimes found it hard to face his steely gaze, as they were convinced he could read their thoughts. They never doubted his love for them, but since he regarded it as a weakness to exhibit tenderness towards his sons, he was not always demonstrative. Indeed, Ilya could not remember ever being caressed by his father. Tolstoy was always much more physically affectionate with his daughters.

With his own children, Tolstoy was a rigorous and exacting teacher, and it was sometimes hard keeping up with him (Tanya dreaded her maths lessons with her father as he could be very impatient). Not only did the word 'can't' not exist in his vocabulary, but he always went at a cracking pace, just like the fast trot he maintained on horseback. The Tolstoy children were taught by both their parents, with their father taking them for mathematics, Latin and Greek, while their mother was responsible for Russian and French lessons. Then there was a local priest who came twice a week to teach the Scriptures, a drawing teacher for Tanya later on, and a succession of resident tutors, several of whom were foreign. Since Tolstoy admired many aspects of British education, the first of the many tutors hired for the three eldest children was an English governess, Hannah Tarsey, who arrived in November 1866. Neither Tolstoy nor Sonya knew English well, so before her arrival they read their way through Wilkie Collins's
A Woman in White.

Hannah Tarsey was the daughter of the gardener at Windsor Castle, and she arrived in Russia with her sister Jenny, who was taken on by another family. At nineteen, Hannah was only three years younger than Sonya. The two could not communicate at all at first,
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but she was hard-working and friendly, and was to become an adored member of the family. Soon she had the children on a regime of regular baths, and introduced the family to Christmas pudding and the custom of setting it alight (recipe no. 26 in Sonya's recipe book: 'Plump-puding'). Hannah obviously missed Sunday roasts at home in Berkshire, as she also tried out Yorkshire pudding on the Tolstoys (recipe no. 132: 'Pastry baked for Roast Beef'). Hannah threw herself into Russian life, and stayed with the Tolstoys for six years, but she suffered from poor health and at the end of the summer in 1872 left to become governess to the children of Sonya's sister Tanya in the Caucasus. Her health improved in the more temperate southern climate there and two years later she married into impoverished Georgian royalty by becoming the wife of Prince Dmitry Machutadze (and won over her in-laws by eventually making a success of the family's sheep-cheese business).
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Fyodor (Theodor) Kaufmann was installed as the boys' tutor when Hannah left, and he gave all the children German lessons. He fell for the blonde and pretty Dora who replaced Hannah as the girls' governess, but she did not last long, as she proved incapable of exerting any authority. This was partly because Tolstoy had a golden-haired Irish setter of the same name (he liked to name his dogs after characters in novels by Dickens). That made it even harder for anyone to take Dora seriously. Then came Emily, who was quiet and serious and cried a lot.

The Tolstoy children saw far more of their tutors and governesses than they did their father, or even their mother, who was always busy sewing clothes for them or attending to domestic matters when she was not copying out manuscripts. Their upbringing was also influenced by other members of the populous household in which they lived, amongst whom were some eccentric characters. First of all there was the ageing Aunt Toinette in her cap and shawl, whose room was full of icons in silver frames that were polished by her maid Aksinya Maximovna, who by then was equally doddering. The children associated Aunt Toinette with the smell of cypress, and drawers in her commode full of gingerbread, which she would treat them to sometimes. She was kind, but the children found both her and her companion very dull. Natalya Petrovna always mumbled on about landowners, army officers and monasteries, and to Sergey she always seemed to speak as if she had a mouthful of kasha. Then there were all the servants—the family's former serfs. The most venerable of them was Agafya Mikhailovna, the old maid of Tolstoy's grandmother, who had in later years tended the sheep and worked as the family's housekeeper, and was now living on a pension on the estate. She was a tall, thin and slightly scary figure for the children when they were small, but she was a beloved member of the household, who before Tolstoy was married used to sit quietly by the samovar reading the lives of saints on cold winter evenings. She was affectionately known by everyone as the 'dog governess', as she lived, in a state of some squalor, with all the family's borzois and other hunting dogs. The small, round Maria Afanasievna Arbuzova, who was nanny to the five eldest Tolstoy children, was also greatly loved. She became housekeeper after Hannah arrived, and always spoiled the children, furtively giving them Persian dried apricots and other treats from the pantry. Both she and her two sons Pavel and Sergey, also trusted family servants, were very close to the Tolstoy children. Pavel later taught Tolstoy the art of cobbling, while Sergey became Tolstoy's personal servant after the faithful Alexey Ste-panov retired. The mild-mannered Alexey, for whom the children had a great respect, had originally been a Yasnaya Polyana house serf, and had accompanied Tolstoy to the Crimea. He was married to Dunyasha Bannikova, the daughter of Tolstoy's first tutor, and when Ilya was born in 1866, Tolstoy promoted him to become the estate manager. The Tolstoy children had deep connections to nearly everyone in the household. Evlampia Matveyevna, who had acted as Sergey's wet-nurse, for example, was the wife of the Yasnaya Polyana coachman Filipp Rodionov, who looked after the boys' ponies.

In order to accommodate their burgeoning family, as well as the foreign tutors, the Tolstoys were soon obliged to build a large new extension on to their house. They had built the first extension back in the summer of 1866, and at the end of 1871 they created a large new drawing room and dining room upstairs, and a study for Tolstoy downstairs, with a spacious wooden veranda outside for summer repasts.
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The additions destroyed the symmetry of the two identical wings that had once flanked the manor house Tolstoy had sold to pay his gambling debts, but provided much-needed extra room. The second and final extension was completed in December 1871, and was ready for Christmas, which was always one of the most joyous times of year for the Tolstoy children. As well as supervising the scrubbing of floors and the hanging of pictures after all the painting and decorating was finished, Sonya retrieved from storage antique candelabras and old family tableware, as well as sewing masquerade costumes and gilding walnuts in preparation for the arrival of the family's guests just before midnight on Christmas Eve in three sleighs. More guests arrived the following day, and after the tree had been decorated there was ice-skating and tobogganing, with everyone collapsing of fits of laughter when they took a tumble or landed in a snowdrift. That year, as well as the seven Tolstoys plus Hannah, Aunt Toinette and Natalya Petrovna, there was Sonya's uncle Kostya, Tolstoy's aunt Polina and his nephew and nieces Kolya, Varya and Liza, plus the latter's husband Leonid Dmitrievich, Tolstoy's old friend Dmitry Alexeyevich Dyakov and his daughter Masha plus Sofya, her former governess and another visiting English governess, Katie—all in all, twenty sat down to dinner. Late into the evening, Uncle Kostya started playing a waltz, and soon everyone was dancing, followed by the hilarious spectacle of watching the rotund, red-bearded Dmitry Alexeyevich striking up a Cossack dance with Leonid Dmitrievich.

Christmas in Russia was about the only time the Tolstoy children were allowed toys. Tanya in particular cherished the dolls her godfather Dmitry Alexeyevich gave her—they were invariably called Masha, after his daughter, who turned sixteen in 1871, and whom she clearly idolised. Christmas was also the time for wearing masks, cross-dressing, and dressing up as animals, and the second day of festivities that year saw Tanya dressing up as a powdered Marquis in a long blue robe, accompanied by her brother Sergey as the Marquise. Ilya put on a red skirt, Katie transformed herself into a clown, Liza became a muzhik, and Sonya donned Russian national dress. Next came the appearance of Uncle Kostya and Kolya as the traditional dancing bears, led by Dmitry Alexeyevich in bast shoes, who was accompanied by a leaping goat whom the children gleefully recognised as their father.
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This was one of the happiest times at Yasnaya Polyana, and also one of the last happy times.

When they were young, the elder children also used to look forward to the summer months when people came to visit. Their father's friends (such as Afanasy Fet and his wife, Sergey Urusov and Nikolay Strakhov) usually came to stay for a few days, but their aunt Tanya and their cousins Dasha, Masha and Vera, who were all under five in 1871, would take up residence in the other wing for over a month every summer. Sonya's younger brother Stepan ('Uncle Styopa') also spent every summer at Yasnaya Polyana from 1866 to 1878 while he was in his teens. Sometimes grandmother Lyubov came to stay (she was now living in Petersburg), and Aunt Polina would make regular visits from the convent in Tula which was now her permanent home. Summer had truly arrived after the buttercups appeared in the lawn in front of the house, and the children's summer clothes had been unpacked and no longer smelled of camphor. It was the time for picnics with the samovar by the stream under the shade of an oak tree, with the girls reading poems aloud. It was the time for mushroom gathering and evening bonfires, sometimes with the thrill of watching the express train speed by the nearby village of Kozlovka. Summer was also the time for jam-making, a ritual that took place every year in the garden under the lime trees, accompanied by clouds of bees and wasps buzzing overhead. Barefoot village girls would come up to the porch on hot afternoons bearing dishes full of mushrooms and strawberries to be exchanged for a few kopecks.

For the two elder Tolstoy boys, summer also meant taking a net into the fields to hunt for butterflies, or riding through oak woods and dewy glades full of forget-me-nots on their Kirghiz ponies, Sharik and Kolpik. If they were lucky, their father would accompany Sergey and Ilya on his English stallion, and more often than not they would tie them to the birch trees next to the bathing hut and go swimming in the pond. Used to having at least a shack to change in when she was growing up, Sonya had been shocked when she had first arrived at Yasnaya Polyana to discover there was nothing but the bare bank, but this was in keeping with Tolstoy's enthusiasm for living the natural life. When Sergey was a baby, Tolstoy also bought some unbleached linen in the village and ordered Sonya to make traditional peasant shirts with a skewed collar for him, like the ones he himself wore and became identified with (which later even came to be named the
tolstovka
after him). Sonya dutifully complied, but she also made little shirts out of her fine muslin blouses for Sergey to wear under the rough linen.
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Just twice, in 1873 and in 1875, the Tolstoy family went away for their summer holidays, to their new estate out in the steppe of Samara province, over 500 miles away to the east. It was a huge adventure for the children, and an enormous undertaking for their parents. Tolstoy had made the trip several times already for health reasons: he was a great advocate of koumiss, the fermented mare's milk produced by the nomadic Bashkirs. He made his first trip to the steppe in the summer of 1862, before his marriage, and then returned in 1871 and 1872, leaving Sonya and the children at home. In 1871 he took Stepan Bers (now sixteen) and his old servant Vanya Suvorov with him, and was away for six weeks.
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At that time, there was no railway beyond Nizhny Novgorod, which was already two days away from Yasnaya Polyana, and just to get to the remote steppe village where Tolstoy undertook his koumiss cure required a two-day passage on a Volga steamer, and then a further two days of travel in a
tarantass
from Samara, which lay on the main highway to Central Asia. What awaited at the end of the journey was mile upon mile of scorched, treeless steppe, a round felt tent, an almost exclusive diet of mutton, and gallons of koumiss.