Tolstoy

The Tolstoys learned the full story about their enigmatic French tutor only after he had left their employ in late 1879. In 1880 the Communards were amnestied and the dapper, mustachioed Vicomte Montels returned to France, taking with him the Tolstoys’ French-Swiss governess Lucie Gachet. They later married and then moved to Tunisia, where Montels became editor of the Tunis Journal. Mademoiselle Gachet had arrived as a French teacher for Tanya and Masha in September 1876,³⁸ at around the same time as the latest English governess Annie Phillips, and had first been hotly pursued by the family’s Russian tutor Vladimir Rozhdestvensky. The Tolstoys had been amongst the first Russians to acquire an English croquet set when they became available in Moscow in the 1870s, and they became avid players on warm summer evenings when the air was cooler. Rozhdestvensky took a particular delight in hitting Lucie Gachet’s ball in the direction of the pond, telling her he was sending it to the frogs. Like Jules Rey, he had a drink problem, and was soon dismissed, no doubt to Mlle Gachet’s relief. Sergey Tolstoy extended sympathy towards the family’s young male tutors when he was writing his memoirs much later. They were always on display, as he put it, occupying a difficult position somewhere between servants and employers, and they were usually rather bored. As a consequence, when they were not at loggerheads with each other they tended to develop infatuations with the family’s pretty young governesses.

Having sorted out the family’s teachers at the beginning of 1878, Tolstoy was keen to get back to fiction, and his religious views did not yet interfere with those plans. Some twenty years after writing War and Peace, he was keen to write another historical novel, and he was still fixated on the Decembrist Uprising. Back in the early 1860s Tolstoy had found himself going back in time from the 1825 uprising to the 1812 war with Napoleon, and finally to the events of 1805 before feeling he was at the right place to begin. But he had got no further than the immediate aftermath of 1812 in War and Peace, so he had never followed Pierre Bezukhov’s transformation into a Decembrist, or written about the uprising. Now, in the late 1870s, he began to be drawn to the events surrounding Nicholas I’s accession, and to the Russo-Turkish War of 1829. At the same time he was also interested in writing a novel about Russian peasant settlers colonising new lands, such as the territories east of the Volga near Samara and Orenburg with which he was personally familiar. He was excited by the prospect of somehow combining both these topics, and 1878 was a year of frenetic activity in which he gathered a mass of historical material and oral testimony in order first to bring the period alive for himself. In February 1878 Tolstoy went to Moscow on a foraging expedition, and held the first of many meetings with various Decembrists and their descendants. He also started marshalling his friends in libraries and archives to send him materials, which meant renewing his contact with Pyotr Bartenev, the editor of the journal Russian Archive, and depending, as usual, on Strakhov. He also began bombarding relatives with contacts in high places (such as Alexandrine and Sonya’s uncle Alexander Bers) with requests for help with primary sources. Tolstoy had further meetings with Decembrists in Moscow in March before travelling on St Petersburg to continue his research, and also tie up a new property deal which enabled him to enlarge his Samara estate by over 10,000 acres.