Tolstoy (4 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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By this time the monastery had become one of the most sacred places in Russia (and was attracting around 20,000 pilgrims each year),
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Count Andrey Ivanovich Tolstoy, as he now became at the age of thirty-nine, was a loyal servant of the state. He was also clearly fiscally astute, as by the time of his death in 1803 the family's fortunes had begun to improve. The profligate and sybaritic ways of Tolstoy's grandfather, Ilya Andreyevich (1757–1820), however, ensured the family was soon impecunious again. Ilya Andreyevich followed the conventional career path at this time for Russian noblemen, who were still required to serve: he went into the army. After retiring in his thirties, he got married, and he married well: he and his wife Pelageya Nikolayevna (1762–1838) had at their disposal not only a Moscow mansion, but also extensive properties in Tula province. They chose to make their home in their 5,500-acre Polyany estate, which came with hundreds of serfs, an aviary and orchards. The couple lived in some style: the sterlet served at their table came fresh from the White Sea via Arkhangelsk, the oysters were imported from Holland, while asparagus and pineapples were grown in the huge greenhouses they built on their lands. According to one family legend, the count even despatched his linen to Amsterdam to be laundered. Tolstoy describes their life as one long succession of 'parties, theatres, balls, dinners, excursions'.
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