Tolstoy

Aline was thirty-three when Tolstoy was born, and by this time she had become exceptionally pious. If it came naturally to Tolstoy later in his life to want to devote his money and energy to helping others, it may have been partly because he grew up with an aunt who practised the Christian principles she preached. She not only spent her time praying, observing the fasts, reading the lives of saints and visiting monasteries, but, like Princess Maria in War and Peace, sought out the company of monks, nuns, religious wanderers, beggars and holy fools. Some of these people came on visits to Yasnaya Polyana, but others virtually lived on the estate, including Marya Gerasimovna, a holy fool. She had spent her youth wandering through Russia in men’s clothes under the guise of ‘Ivan the Fool’, a familiar character from Russian fairy tales. When Tolstoy’s mother was about to give birth for the fifth time, she had asked Marya Gerasimovna to pray that she would finally have a girl. After his sister Masha was born, Marya Gerasimovna became her godmother, and a familiar figure in the Tolstoy household. The touching, naïve faith of their gardener Akim led the Tolstoys to see him as almost another holy fool who lived at Yasnaya Polyana. The children would come across him praying in the main room of the summer house which stood between the two orangeries. Akim talked aloud to God, his ‘healer’, as if he was standing right there in front of him.²⁷

Foreshadowing the path later taken by her nephew, Aline consistently gave her money away to the poor, maintained the simplest of diets and paid no attention to her external appearance, to the point of looking extremely unkempt; her nephew was clearly pained in his memoirs to have to comment on the rancid smell he remembered her exuding. At the same time he recalled her radiant expression and good-natured laughter, and his childhood memory of how uniformly kind she was to people, whatever their background, must have sunk deep into his consciousness. Aunt Aline may have had a far greater impact on her nephew’s character than he realised.

Aline was an important person in Tolstoy’s life, but he was not as close to her as he was to his aunt Toinette, who had been taken in as an orphaned child by Tolstoy’s grandparents. Tolstoy supposed she must have been very attractive as a young girl with her mass of curly dark hair tied severely into a thick braid, agate-black eyes and a vivacious expression. He never stopped to ponder whether she was beautiful or not when he was a boy, but simply loved everything about her – her eyes, her smile, her slender hands and her warm personality. Toinette spoke better French than Russian, was a fine pianist and, like Aunt Aline, kind to everyone around her, including the servants. She may never have stopped to consider questions of social justice, according to Tolstoy, and she accepted the existence of serfdom as a fact of life, but he emphasises in his memoirs that she used her position of privilege only to serve people. She was also adamantly opposed to the family’s serfs receiving corporal punishment of any kind. Tolstoy could not indeed remember her uttering even one harsh word in all the thirty years he knew her. She was a strong-willed and selfless person, he recollected in his memoirs, but her most important defining feature was love. Her whole life was love, Tolstoy wrote, but for just one person – his father. Despite wishing otherwise, Tolstoy was aware that she loved him and his siblings because of his father, and her affection for everyone else came also as a natural consequence of loving him.