CHAPTER II
LIFE OF TOLSTOY—"A LANDED PROPRIETOR"—"CHILDHOOD"—"THE
COSSACKS"—"TALES FROM SEBASTOPOL"
Leo Tolstoy was born August 28, 1828, at the village of Yasnaya Polyana, not far from Tula, on the old main road to Kieff.
His parents were Count Nicolas Tolstoy and Princess Marie Volkonsky, both of them members of well-known families. The Tolstoy family had played a famous, though at times a questionable part in Russian history; its first Count—Peter Tolstoy—was an accomplice in the assassination of the Tsarevitch Alexis, son of Peter the Great; he was appointed Chief of the Secret Service, and, later on, enjoyed the confidence of the Empress Catherine I. When Peter II, son of the murdered Alexis, ascended the throne, Count Tolstoy lost his great position; being at that time an old man, he retired to the monastery of Solovetsky on the White Sea, where he died. The Tolstoy family were, for a period, deprived of their title, but it was restored in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great.
The Princess Marie Volkonsky also came of an eminent family; they traced their descent from Rurik, and several of her near relatives had been great generals.
The novelist's father, Nicolas Tolstoy, served in the great campaigns of 1813 and 1814; he was taken prisoner by the French but liberated in 1815, when the allied armies entered Paris. Tolstoy has depicted a number of his relatives in the novel of War and Peace; his father is Nicolas Rostof and his mother the Princess Mariya Bolkonsky; in real life as in the book, this mother appears to have been the more remarkable of the two parents, a woman possessed of a singularly noble and beautiful character. Leo was only eighteen months old at the time of his mother's death, but, from what his aunts and other relatives told him, he created a portrait which, whether accurate or not, is of unforgettable charm.
The father died when Leo had reached the age of nine, and the children—four brothers and a sister—were left to the guardianship of their father's sister; they were, as a matter of fact, brought up mainly by a lady named Tatiana Yergolsky, whom they called "aunt," but who was, in reality, only a distant relative. Tatiana Yergolsky had a romantic history; she loved Count Nicolas Tolstoy, and he returned her affection, but she sacrificed herself in order that he might marry the wealthy heiress, Princess Marie Volkonsky. After the marriage she remained an inmate of her cousin's house and won the deep affection of his wife; when a widower Count Nicolas once more desired to marry Tatiana, but she still refused, fearing to spoil the tenderness of her relation to the dead wife and to the children. It would be difficult to imagine a character more sweet and self-sacrificing; upon the orphaned children she bestowed a devoted love; to Leo she took the place of the mother he had never known, and the father he had lost so soon; she was the chief happiness of his childhood, and he declares that, in the building up of his moral character, she, of all human beings, played the most beneficent part.
He says: "Aunt Tatiana had the greatest influence on my life. It was she who taught me while yet in my childhood the moral joy of love. Not by words but by her whole being she imbued me with love. I saw, I felt how happy she was in loving, and I understood the joy of love. That was the first lesson. And the second was that she taught me the beauty of a quiet, lonely life."
The four Tolstoy brothers possessed strong individualities, and Tolstoy had a keen feeling of affection for all the members of his family; his favourite brother was, however, Nicolas—some six years older than himself. He and Nicolas, in their child's play, founded a society which they called "Ant-Brothers," which was to embrace all mankind and all the earth in a loving union; they buried a green stick as a kind of charm to celebrate the founding of this society. When Tolstoy came to die he asked that he might be buried on the hill where, so long ago, he and Nicolas had placed the green stick; it will, at any rate, be one of the world's great places of pilgrimage.