1837
When Tolstoy was eight years old the family moved to Moscow for his elder brothers' education. The following summer they lost their father, who, having gone to Toúla on business, fell down in the street on his way to visit his friend Temeshóf, and died of apoplexy. What money he had with him was stolen, but some unnegotiable bonds were brought back to the Tolstoys in Moscow by an unknown beggar. The funeral took place at Yásnaya Polyána; and Leo, who did not attend it, long fancied that his father was not really dead. Looking at the faces of strangers in the streets of Moscow, he felt almost certain he might at any moment meet him alive again.
This event brought the problems of life and death vividly to the boy's mind, and nine months later the impression was intensified by the death of his grandmother, who never recovered from the shock of her son's death. Hers was the first death Tolstoy witnessed, and he never forgot the horror he felt when, as she lay dying of dropsy, he was admitted to kiss her swollen white hand and saw her, dressed in white, lying motionless on a high white bed. But he says:
I remember that new jackets of black material, braided with white, were made for all of us. It was dreadful to see the undertakers' men hanging about near the house, and then bringing in the coffin, with its lid covered with glazed brocade, and my grandmother's stern face, with its Roman nose, and her white cap and the white kerchief on her neck, lying high in the coffin on the table; and it was sad to see the tears of our aunts and of Páshenka; but yet the new braided jackets and the soothing attitude adopted towards us by those around, gratified us.... I remember how pleasant it was to me to overhear during the funeral the conversation of some gossiping female guests, who said, 'Complete orphans; their father only lately dead, and now the grandmother gone too.'
Some time after this, an event occurred that is recorded on the first page of Tolstoy's Confession:
I remember how, when I was about eleven, a boy Vladímir Milútin (long since dead), a Grammar School pupil, visited us one Sunday and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his School. The discovery was that there is no God, and all that we are taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news. They called me to their council and we all, I remember, became animated, and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible.
Various stories have been preserved relating to Tolstoy's boyhood, and some of them are sufficiently characteristic to be worth repeating.
One incident which made a strong impression on the lad, keenly sensitive as he always was to any shade of injustice, was the following:
Soon after the death of their father and grandmother, the orphan Tolstoys, then living in rather straitened circumstances (owing to the property being left in trust), were invited to a Christmas Tree at the house of an acquaintance, and the young Princes Gortchakóf, nephews of the then Minister of War, were also among the guests. All the children received presents; but whereas the Gortchakófs had expensive ones, the Tolstoys, to their annoyance, received cheap common ones.
Another occurrence that clung to his recollection through life, was the friendly welcome they received one day when they made their way uninvited into a private garden in Moscow; and the sad disappointment they experienced when, returning a few days later unaccompanied by a pretty and attractive girl who had been with them on the former occasion, they were coldly informed that it was private ground, not open to the public.
Other stories, told by Tolstoy himself or by the family, illustrate his impulsive, imaginative, strenuous and rather erratic nature at this period.
When he was about seven or eight years old he had an ardent desire to fly, and persuaded himself that it was possible to do so. It was only necessary to sit down tight on your heels, clasping your arms firmly round your knees, and the tighter you held them the higher you would fly. As Tolstoy was always ardent to put his beliefs into practice, it is not very surprising that one day, soon after the family had moved to Moscow, he stayed behind in the class-room when he should have come down to dinner, and climbing out on the window-sill, some six yards from the ground, threw himself out. He was picked up unconscious. The ill results of his fall were fortunately confined to a slight concussion of the brain; and after sleeping for eighteen hours on end he woke up again quite well.
It would be a mistake to take his story, Childhood, as strictly autobiographical; but it contains many passages which one knows from other sources to be true of his own life, and one such is the passage in which (speaking in the character of Nikólenka) he says:
I knew very well that I was plain, and therefore every reference to my appearance was painfully offensive to me.... Moments of despair frequently came over me: I imagined that there could be no happiness on earth for a man with so broad a nose, such thick lips, and such small grey eyes as mine. I asked God to perform a miracle and change me into a handsome boy, and all I then had and all I could ever possess in the future, I would have given for a handsome face.
In fact, his personal appearance caused the sensitive lad much concern, but his efforts to improve it were unsuccessful. On one occasion he clipped his eyebrows, and the unsatisfactory results of that operation occasioned him great grief.
He records in his Reminiscences the following incident, which certainly intensified his lifelong antipathy to corporal punishment:
I do not remember for what, but for something quite undeserving of punishment, St. Thomas [the resident French tutor who succeeded Rössel] first locked me into a room, and secondly threatened to flog me. I thereupon experienced a dreadful feeling of anger indignation and disgust, not only towards St. Thomas himself, but towards the violence with which I was threatened.
When quite a small boy he conceived an attachment for the nine-year-old daughter of his father's friend, Islényef, and being jealous of her for daring to talk to others, he angrily pushed her off a balcony, with the result that she limped for a long time afterwards. A quarter of a century later, when he married this lady's daughter, his mother-in-law used laughingly to remind him of the incident, and say, 'Evidently you pushed me off the balcony in my childhood that you might marry my daughter afterwards!'
His sister relates that once when they were driving in a troika (i.e. three horses abreast) to Yásnaya, Leo got down during a break in the journey and went forward on foot. When the carriage started again and began to overtake him he took to running, and when the horses went faster he also increased his speed, racing as hard as he could. He was not overtaken till he had gone about two miles and was completely tired out. He was lifted back into the carriage gasping for breath, perspiring and quite exhausted. Any one not endowed with the remarkable physical vigour that, in spite of frequent attacks of ill-health, has characterised Tolstoy through life, would probably have done themselves serious injury had they taxed their vital resources as recklessly as he often did.
All accounts agree in representing him as an original and odd little fellow, unwilling to do things like other people. He would for instance enter a drawing-room and, carefully placing his feet together and bending his head, would make his bow backwards, saluting each of the company in turn.
Two incidents are recorded relating to the love of riding which has remained a characteristic of his through life.
When his brothers were sent to a riding-school, Leo (in spite of his father's assurances and those of the riding-master that he was too small to begin and would tumble off) also obtained permission to learn to ride. At his first lesson he duly tumbled off, but begged to be replaced in the saddle; and he did not fall off again, but became an expert horseman. In one of the short stories he wrote many years later for the use of school-children, he tells how he once wished to ride the old horse Raven after his brothers had each had a turn on it; and how Raven being too tired to move from the stables, he beat it till he broke his switch on its sides. He then demanded a stouter switch from the serf in charge, but the man replied:
'Ah, master, you have no pity! Why do you beat him? He is twenty years old, and is tired out; he can hardly breathe. Why, for a horse, he is as old as Timoféyitch I thought of Timoféyitch, and hearkened to the man. I got off the horse's back; and when I noticed how its steaming sides were working, and how heavily it breathed through its nostrils, swishing its thin tail, I understood how hard it was for it. Till then I had thought that it was as happy as I was myself. And I felt so sorry for Raven that I began to kiss his sweaty neck and to beg his pardon for having beaten him. Since then I have grown up, but I always have pity on horses, and always remember Raven and Timoféyitch when I see horses ill-treated. He does not appear to have been very good at his lessons, and himself somewhere mentions the dictum of a student who used to coach his brothers and himself, and said of their aptitude for learning: 'Sergéy both wishes and can, Dmítry wishes but can't' (this was not true), 'and Leo neither wishes nor can.' (This, I think, was perfectly true.) On the other hand, St. Thomas, the French tutor already referred to (he figures in Childhood as St. Jérôme), must have noticed the lad's capacity, for he used to say, 'Ce petit a une tête: c'est un petit Molière' (This little one has a head: he is a little Molière).