Tolstoy

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.¹⁰⁰

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.¹⁰¹ 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.

A primitive Bashkir village in the middle of nowhere was not every Russian’s idea of the ideal health resort. Much more fashionable at that time was to go abroad, either to the German spas, or to the French Riviera. Those who wished to stay within the Russian Empire were also now spoiled for choice: they could enjoy the bracing sea air at a lido on the Baltic, take the waters at the resorts that had sprung up around the mineral springs in the Caucasus, such as kislovodsk or Pyatigorsk, or patronise the increasingly popular seaside town of Yalta in the balmy Crimea, where the Romanovs vacationed. It had been a long time since Tolstoy cared for fashion, however, and he positively relished the lack of amenities, writing merrily to Sonya to tell her the complete absence of beds, crockery and white bread (food was consumed from wooden bowls without cutlery) would be more than her ‘kremlin heart’ could stand.¹⁰²

The Bashkirs were originally nomadic horsemen from the southern urals who lived between the kama and ural rivers, east of Samara. A Turkic-speaking Moslem people, they were forced to acknowledge Russian supremacy after the conquest of kazan in the mid-sixteenth century, but then gradually found themselves becoming a minority as Russians and other ethnic groups from the Volga region settled in the lands they had for centuries believed belonged to them.¹⁰³ This was frontier territory for the Russians, who in the eighteenth century proceeded to build a line of forts from Samara to the new town of Orenburg, in preparation for advancing into kazakhstan and beyond (Samarkand was conquered for the great White Tsar’s new province of Turkestan in 1868). While the Bashkirs had been brutally subjugated by the middle of the eighteenth century, and their lands fully absorbed into the Russian Empire, they were given a special tax status and they tried to maintain their traditional way of life amongst the more numerous Russians who steadily colonised their fertile pastures. One of these Russians was Tolstoy.