by A. N. Wilson
By the time the school had been established, and Tolstoy’s pedagogical enthusiasms were in full swing, Aksinya had provided him with at least one pupil: a son called Timofey. In later life he was to have the job of coachman to one of Tolstoy’s legitimate sons – an exact repetition of the state of things at Yasnaya Polyana in the twenties.
Probably Aksinya was illiterate. Certainly, she was not gifted with the ability to pour out words and to describe her emotions – as was the woman Tolstoy actually married. So we do not know what Aksinya felt. By the time the child, Tolstoy’s firstborn son, came into the world, Lev Nikolayevich had contracted a legitimate union in Moscow.
This all happened in the late summer of 1862. The Bers family had, for some time, occupied a special place in Tolstoy’s interests among those whom he scrutinised for possible wife material. Old Bers was the sort of man Tolstoy describes so well in his novels in such figures as Rostov père or Stiva; sybaritic, simpatico, at ease with the world. He, it will be remembered, had been the lover of Turgenev’s mother. The incident would still appear to have rankled and if, like Tolstoy, you found pleasure in tormenting Turgenev, the Bers household was a tempting one to frequent. Old Bers was a Court doctor and the family lived within the Kremlin in Moscow. His wife was much younger than he was, only eighteen months Tolstoy’s senior, and (here must lie an explanation for some of what happened next) not merely a childhood acquaintance of Tolstoy’s but someone who had already been fed through his imagination in the Childhood, Boyhood and Youth sequence. For Bers’s wife was none other than Tolstoy’s childhood friend Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavina, one of the little girls whom he had pushed off a balcony in a fit of prepubescent jealousy: his brother was in love with her, and the innocent narrator of Childhood loved her too. Lyubov remained one of the best friends of Tolstoy’s sister Marya. Here was love as Tolstoy thought he had known it before the shameful scene in the Kazan whore-house, before the coition, and the tears, and the clap. Here too was something which always excited Tolstoy’s heart, a whole family, coherent and apparently rumbustiously fond of each other. If, as is so often said, he depicted the Bers family in the Rostov scenes of War and Peace we can sense some of the attraction which these people held for him. It was not enough to Copperfield the past. He had to find absolution, to go back and back, if necessary before his birth, and pronounce the record clean. These wholesome, happy people provided him with the chance to do so.
It may be of significance that Tolstoy first met the woman he would marry when she was not quite twelve years old.11 It was back in 1856. Tolstoy, newly returned from the Crimean War, had called on the Berses at their summer residence at Pokrovskoye, eight miles or so outside Moscow.
They begged Tolstoy to teach them ‘The Eighth of September’, one of the patriotic songs which he was rumoured to have composed during the war, and then he had sat at the piano with Tatyana Andreyevna – his future sister-in-law, then aged ten – and played duets. Then he had given place on the piano stool to the girls’ uncle, and while this man played Chopin waltzes and mazurkas, Tolstoy had murmured to their mother, ‘Ah, Lyubov Alexandrovna, do you remember how we used to dance to these tunes together when we were young?’ Tatyana Bers, recalling the evening in her memoirs, misread the occasion. She thought that there was a tendresse between her mother and their visitor. But the operative phrase in the exchange is ‘when we were young’. This was a twenty-nine year old talking to a woman of not much over thirty. What he meant was ‘when you were young’. He now found Lyubov Alexandrovna hideous, bald and frail. But not so her little daughters, who awakened in him that peculiar blend of concupiscence and yearning for childhood innocence which played so big a part in explaining the success of David Copperfield. From the mid to late fifties onwards, Tolstoy had his eye on the Bers girls. He had his eye on many other girls too, but their mother’s link with his own imaginative past, as portrayed in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, is probably important. One cannot exaggerate the extent to which Tolstoy’s fiction is his version of how he wanted life to be. It is not autobiography in the simple sense (if there is a simple sense of the word autobiography, and if any autobiographer ever knows, or wants, to tell the truth). But the fiction is much the more important thing, arranging events to make them tolerable to himself. Into this tortuous process the Bers daughters were now, willy-nilly, absorbed. One of the very remarkable facts about Tolstoy, when we consider how quarrelsome he was and how stormy was his relationship with his wife, is the comparative stability of his relationship with the Bers family as a whole. In their marital dealings, they were no happier than he was. The old doctor was a notorious lecher and betrayer of his wife. The daughters’ marriages turned out quite poorly. Yelizaveta’s first marriage ended in divorce, and little Tatyana was not very happy with her Kuzminsky cousin. But for Tolstoy, the Berses were always an image of family happiness. Because the parents were alive, they were a more plausible and close-knit family group than the Tolstoys of Yasnaya Polyana. What is more, he liked them. At least one of his brothers-in-law, for example, was to become a close friend.
There were two questions, as marriage approached. The first was whether he should marry at all. And the second question was whether, if he married a Bers girl, he should marry Yelizaveta, Sofya or Tatyana. At the beginning of 1862 these questions were all highly tentative. He was as close to marrying one of the other girls, or just opting for an irregular life with the girl he was actually in love with, Aksinya. But then, in the summer of 1862, one of those strange external events happened in Tolstoy’s life which plunged him into impulsive action.
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This book is primarily the story of a novelist, but not of a novelist whose works are self-contained. Rather, it is the history of a great genius whose art grew out of his three uneasy and irresolvable relationships: his relationship with God, his relationship with women and his relationship with Russia. In all cases, the relationships were stormy, full of contradictions. They were love-hate relationships, and the hate was sometimes rather hard to distinguish from the love. There will be several points, later in the story, when it looks as if the most important of those love-hate relationships is his love-hate for God. Most of Tolstoy’s biographers – tempted by the profusion of diaries and letters which document the forty-year Borodino-style bombardment which constituted the Tolstoy marriage – have concentrated upon that. It can never be forgotten. But it is also a mistake to forget the relationship with Russia. This is not merely a whimsical way of speaking, nor even just an emotional matter. If old Prince Volkonsky, Tolstoy’s grandfather, had not quarrelled with the Emperor Paul, if Tolstoy’s father had not been so subject to khalatnost’, if everything had been just a little different, the Tolstoy brothers would have been great powers in the land. Their cousin Dmitry was Minister of Education and Procurator of the Holy Synod. Their cousin Alexandra was daily at Court. They were closely related to the great families, and to the men of influence; but a series of chances and the mystery of their own character had decreed a different destiny for the Tolstoy siblings. Instead of being a lady-in-waiting at Court, Marya Nikolayevna was pursuing the most extraordinary romantic adventures, having brought to an end her notoriously unsatisfactory marriage. Sergey had as little regard for the conventions, and as little desire to get on in the world. And Lev Nikolayevich himself, even if he had passed the exams at the right point in his career, and not become addicted to a way of life which made ‘service’ in the bureaucracy seem an unattractive option, was nowhere near exercising authority. And yet, as he surely felt, they were born to lead; and if things had gone differently – ah, all those ifs of Tolstoy’s personal and national history – he would have been a legislator, not just of his little kingdom of Yasnaya, but of a wider sphere.
In terms of Tolstoy’s personal mythology, life started to go wrong at puberty, with the awakening of sexual desire. In terms of the national myth, in which he and most enlightened aristocrats believed, the loss of innocence occurred with the Decembrist Rising.
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He had begun to think about the Decembrists as a possible theme for a novel back in 1856, and he returned to the theme in 1860–61.12 Having finished The Cossacks in 1862, he again turned back to the Decembrists, at about the same time as the Bers girls had begun to fascinate him.13
His story was to concern a Decembrist exile returning to Russia from Siberia in 1856. Consciously or not, he was obviously inspired by his own feelings as a young war veteran returning from the Crimea. What sort of a Russia was he returning to? But with all the fertile comprehensiveness of his mind, Tolstoy wanted to use his returning hero as a vehicle for looking at the whole of Russia. His hero would now be quite old, looking back to the days of 1825 when, already a mature, married man, he had tried to change the despotic and autocratic way in which the Empire was controlled.
But then, Tolstoy had realised that in order to understand this man, it was going to be necessary to trace his history back yet further: to the times of Napoleon and the 1812 campaign.
For the third time, then, I went back still further into the past, prompted by a feeling which to most of my readers may perhaps seem strange but which I trust will be intelligible to those whose judgement I value. This feeling can only be described in one word – shame; I felt ashamed to tell the story of our victories over Napoleon and his army without mentioning also our own disasters, our own disgraces. Who can read the many patriotic accounts of the year 1812 without feeling secret shame? . . .14
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The Decembrist Rising, in Tolstoy’s imagination, was perhaps the greatest attempt to absolve Russia of its guilt, its shame. The autocracy itself took a different view of eccentric young aristocrats, critical of their methods or their history. Nicholas I had established his famous Third Section, which, under its various names – Cheka or K.G.B. – has been such a conspicuous ornament of Russian life ever since. The ‘liberal’ Alexander II had done nothing to abolish them. It was they who had collected the evidence to exile Herzen. It was they who had Turgenev put under house arrest for a single, tactless phrase in his obituary of Gogol. It was they who were watching Tolstoy.
He had known that they were his enemies ever since the censor had taken exception to the later Sebastopol Sketches. Now they began to be worried by his educational activities. Freelance schools, such as the one which he had established at Yasnaya Polyana, were forbidden by the new laws of 1861.
One of the teachers he had employed had, when a University student, been suspected of printing and distributing anti-religious works. The Tula police, when approached by the Third Section, were able to provide salacious rumours about the ‘debauchery’ of Count Tolstoy. No doubt Aksinya’s name was carefully entered into some police file.
They did not do anything until the summer of 1862. Tolstoy, always haunted by the spectre of his tubercular brother Nikolay, had been worried by a cough, and took off to the Bashkir country of Samara for a rest cure. He left his aunt Tatyana (Tante Toinette) and his sister Marya in charge at Yasnaya Polyana. On July 6, the police descended on Yasnaya Polyana at dawn, headed by a Third Section officer called Colonel Durnovo. They terrified Tolstoy’s aunt and sister, and began a thorough search of the place, turning out all drawers and cupboards. Nadezhda Mandelstam, describing the raid of her flat by the Cheka on May 13, 1934, tells us of how they ‘burst into our poor hushed apartments as though raiding bandits’ lairs or secret laboratories in which masked carbonari were making dynamite and preparing armed resistance’.15 Similar feelings must have occurred to Tolstoy’s aunt and sister as they watched the policemen roughing up their house. They had been told that there was a secret printing press designed for propagating seditious literature. They found a copy of Herzen’s periodical The Bell and that only exacerbated their curiosity and suspicion. Having upturned every drawer, desk, bureau and closet in the house, one of them decided (this is the way that the minds of policemen work) that there might be something interesting in the tiny pond in the park. After an elaborate dredging operation, they discovered only weeds, mud and fish.
The invasion of his little kingdom by these oafs infuriated Tolstoy and he was outraged by the fact that they had frightened his aunt and his sister. It horrified him to think that the Government which authorised such activities was composed of members of his own family and circle, and he wrote off in high dudgeon to his cousin Alexandra in St. Petersburg.
Fine friends you have!. . . . One of your friends, a filthy colonel, read all my letters and diaries which I thought to entrust to the person closest to me only before my death; he read over sets of my correspondence that I wished to keep hidden from the world at any price, and he left, admitting that he had found nothing suspicious. . . . It is my good fortune and that of your friend that I was not here. I would have killed him. Fine! Glorious! That is how your Government makes friends for itself. If you will recall my political attitude you will know that always, and especially since my love for the school, I have been entirely indifferent to the Government, and even more indifferent to the present liberals whom I scorn with all my soul. Now I can no longer say this. I possess bitterness and revulsion, almost hatred for that dear Government. . . .16
In essence, Tolstoy’s political attitude never changed after this incident, though he did his best to cultivate the indifferentism which is the greatest privilege of a man living on a private estate and possessing independent means. But he went on loving Alexandra, and through her, the very class, and the very Government which he hated and reviled. Nothing is ever as simple, in Tolstoy’s attitudes, as he wanted to make it. Nor, for the Government’s part, was their attitude simple towards him. Throughout the reign of three emperors, they were to be wary of him and frightened of his capacity to stir up discontent through his writings. But there was always admiration for his genius, and something more: a vein of indulgent tolerance such as, in a family, might be felt for a wayward uncle. Tolstoy was ‘one of them’.
It is interesting that, in his fury at the police raid, he should have singled out for especially indignant mention the fact that the Colonel read his private letters and diaries. Already the thought had formed itself in Tolstoy’s head that these documents would be read by someone, the person closest to him. If the correspondences were so private that he really wanted no one to read them, it is curious that he had kept not one, but two copies of each letter. As for the identity of that reader – of the diaries – who was she to be? Although he told Alexandra in July that these documents were so secret that no one should be allowed to see them until he was dead, only a few weeks later he was thrusting them into the hands of an eighteen-year-old girl.
It is fairly likely that Tolstoy would have married any of the Bers family had not Lyubov Alexandrovna taken matters into her own hands. A month after the police raid on Yasnaya Polyana, there was the Bers raid. Lyubov Alexandrovna took her three daughters to stay at her father’s estate of Ivitsy, thirty-five miles from Yasnaya Polyana, and one evening they all paid a call, ostensibly to see Marya Nikolayevna. The previous year, the mother had made it fairly clear that she wanted her eldest daughter married off first. Yelizaveta was now nearly twenty. The previous year, when the idea had cropped up, Tolstoy had confided in the diary, ‘I daren’t marry Liza.’ Now, in the summer of 1862, he was aware that ‘Liza seems to be quietly taking possession of me. My God! How beautifully unhappy she would be if she were my wife.’17 Ominous words, which the sister who did eventually marry him must often have read.
The trouble was, that he really preferred the youngest sister Tatyana. Though barely sixteen, she possessed in abundance that animation which the poet Fet found so striking a feature of the Bers family. (‘All of them, notwithstanding the watchful supervision of their mother and their irreproachable modesty, had that attractive quality which the French call du chien.’) Tatyanchik the Imp, they called her. Passionate, enthusiastic, egotistical – she had that quality which Tolstoy so often noticed and loved in his fiction: she was brimming over with life.
After the Bers raid at Y
asnaya Polyana, Tolstoy was bidden over to Ivitsy by Lyubov Alexandrovna, for further chances to size the girls up. Here they were in the house, not of Doctor Bers, but of old Alexander Islenev, in other words of the father in Childhood. There was a curious confluence of memory and desire, life and art. The visits of Count Tolstoy caused increasing excitement among the girls. It was all very seemly. It was nothing much more than music and chit-chat. But after one such visit, their aunt Olga took Tatyana on one side. ‘Why has Liza told me that Lev Nikolayevich intends to marry her when my eyes tell me differently?’ she inquired.
It was at Ivitsy on the night before the girls went back to Moscow that there occurred the romantic scene which Tolstoy was later to mythologise in Anna Karenina, in the proposal scene between Kitty and Levin. In spite of Liza’s beautiful melancholy, and little Tatyanchik’s animation, Tolstoy found himself being drawn inescapably to the middle sister Sofya. He considered her ‘plain and vulgar but she interests me’. Obviously, there was a powerful sexual attraction between them. But, more important than that, he saw a flirtation with Sofya as a way of escaping the net which was closing around himself and Liza. He did not want to marry Liza. He did want to go to bed with Sofya. That, roughly speaking, was the position on their last evening at Ivitsy.