Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s strongest memories of his grandmother were connected with the treat of spending the night in her bedroom with Lev Stepanych, her blind storyteller. In pre-emancipation Russia it was quite common for serfs to become professional storytellers, who could be bought and sold at will by the nobility like pieces of furniture. Lev Stepanych had been purchased for Pelageya Nikolayevna by her late husband, and so he was brought along to Yasnaya Polyana along with the rest of her retinue. He was totally blind, so he had developed an exceptional memory, and was able to recall any story that had been read to him a couple of times word for word.

Tolstoy recalled that Lev Stepanych lived somewhere in the main house, but only appeared in the evening, when he would go upstairs to his grand-mother’s bedroom in preparation for the evening’s storytelling. He would sit in his long blue frock-coat with puffy sleeves on a low windowsill there, and some supper would be brought to him while he waited for Pelageya Nikolayevna to retire. Since he was blind, she undressed in front of him without qualms, and then she and whichever grandchild was with her would climb into bed to get comfortable for that night’s story. Tolstoy vividly recalled the moment when the candle was extinguished in his grandmother’s bedroom, leaving the flickering light of the small lamp burning beneath the icons in the corner. He would see the dim profile of his grandmother tucked up in bed on a mound of pillows, again a vision all in white, this time with a nightcap on her head. At her command, Lev Stepanych’s quiet, steady voice would then launch into a captivating tale – Tolstoy particularly remembered him telling one of Scheherazade’s stories from The Arabian Nights. The story went over the young Lev’s head, but he was transfixed by the sight of the shadow of his grandmother’s profile quivering on the wall.²⁵

Tolstoy’s aunt Aline could not have been more different from her mother Pelageya Nikolayevna, who continued to behave like the grande dame she had once been well into her dotage. Refined and graceful, with dreamy blue eyes and a fair complexion, Aline was fond of reading and she played the harp.²⁶ She scored a great success in Petersburg high society when she came out, and at the age of nineteen, in 1814, she was married off to Karl von Osten-Sacken, son of the Saxon ambassador to Russia, in what was thought to be a brilliant match. The young couple repaired to the family’s Baltic estate, but within a year of the wedding Aline’s husband was showing signs of serious mental illness. Tolstoy tells a gripping story in his memoirs of one incident when the deranged Count von Osten-Sacken shot at his pregnant wife at point-blank range before being permanently committed to an asylum.

Aline recovered (many years later she showed her nephew the scar left by the bullet), but the traumatic experience marked her. She moved back to St Petersburg, but gave birth to a still-born baby. Fearing the effect this would have on her, her family arranged to have her own child replaced with the newly born daughter of a servant they knew about, who was the wife of a court chef. This was Pashenka – Pelageya Ivanovna Nastasina, whom Aunt Aline brought up as her own child. Tolstoy reproduces this story in Part Two of Anna Karenina: Kitty makes friends at the German spa with a Russian girl Varenka, whose background is remarkably similar. Pashenka was about ten years older than Tolstoy, and sickly (she later died of tuberculosis). Neither Tolstoy, who described her as ‘pale, quiet and meek’, nor his siblings seem to have felt she was really their cousin, but she appears in the list he compiled in his memoirs of people he particularly loved in his childhood.