NATASHA

the Romanov insignia. The Decembrists were irate. Volkonsky, who had by now returned from his thirty years of exile, told Tolstoy that the monument had 'trampled on the sacred memory of Novgorod as well as on the graves of all those heroes who fought for our freedom in 1812'.¹⁶⁸

7

'He is an enthusiast, a mystic and a Christian, with high ideals for the new Russia,' Tolstoy wrote to Herzen after meeting Volkonsky in 1859.¹⁶⁹ A distant cousin of the Decembrist, Tolstoy was extremely proud of his Volkonsky heritage. Having lost his mother at the age of three, he had more than just an academic interest in researching the background of her family: for him, it was an emotional necessity. Sergei Volkonsky was a childhood hero of Tolstoy's (all the Decembrists were idolized by the progressive youths of Tolstoy's age) and in time he became the inspiration for Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace.¹⁷⁰ Much of Tolstoy's commitment to the peasants, not to men-tion his desire to become one himself, was inspired by the example of his exiled relative.

In 1859 Tolstoy started a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, the old Volkonsky estate that had passed down to him on his mother's side. The estate had a special meaning for Tolstoy. He had been born in the manor house - on a dark green leather sofa which he kept throughout his life in the study where he wrote his great novels. He spent his childhood on the estate, until the age of nine, when he moved to Moscow with his father. More than an estate, Yasnaya Polyana was his ancestral nest, the place where his childhood memories were kept, and the little patch of Russia where he felt he most belonged. 'I wouldn't sell the house for anything,' Tolstoy told his brother in 1852. 'It's the last thing I'd be prepared to part with.'¹⁷¹ Yasnaya Polyana had been purchased by Tolstoy's great-grandmother, Maria Volkonsky, in 1763. His grandfather, Nikolai Volkonsky, had developed it as a cultural space, building the splendid manor house, with its large collection of European books, the landscaped park and lakes, the spinning factory, and the famous white stone entrance gates that served as a post station on the road from Tula to Moscow. As a boy, Tolstoy idolized his grandfather. He fantasized that he was just like him.¹⁷² This ancestor cult, which was at the emotional core of Tolstoy's conservatism, was expressed in Eugene, the hero of his story 'The Devil' (1889):

It is generally supposed that Conservatives are old people, and that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen. Thus it was with Eugene. Having settled in the village, his aim and ideal was to restore the form of life that had existed, not in his father's time… but in his grandfather's.¹⁷³

Nikolai Volkonsky was brought back to life as Andrei's father Nikolai Bolkonsky in War and Peace - the retired general, proud and independent, who spends his final years on the estate at Bald Hill, dedicating himself to the education of his daughter called (like Tolstoy's mother) Maria.

War and Peace was originally conceived as a 'Decembrist novel', loosely based on the life story of Sergei Volkonsky. But the more the

writer researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots lay in the war of 1812. In the novel's early form (The Decembrist) the Decembrist hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the late 1850s. A second Alexandrine reign has just begun, with the accession of Alexander II to the throne in 1855, and once again, as in 1825, high hopes for political reform are in the air. It was with such hopes that Volkonsky returned to Russia in 1856 and wrote about a new life based on truth:

Falsehood. This is the sickness of the Russian state. Falsehood and its sisters, hypocrisy and cynicism. Russia could not exist without them. Yet surely the point is not just to exist but to exist with dignity. And if we want to be honest with ourselves, then we must recognize that if Russia cannot exist otherwise than she existed in the past, then she does not deserve to exist.¹⁷⁴

To live in truth, or, more importantly, to live in truth in Russia - these were the questions of Tolstoy's life and work, and the main concerns of War and Peace. They were first articulated by the men of 1812.

Volkonsky's release from exile was one of the first acts of the new Tsar. Of the 121 Decembrists who had been sent into exile in 1826, only nineteen lived to return to Russia in 1856. Sergei himself was a broken man, and his health never really recovered from the hardships of Siberia. Forbidden to settle in the two main cities, he was none the less a frequent guest in the Moscow houses of the Slavophiles, who saw his gentle nature, his patient suffering, his simple 'peasant' lifestyle and his closeness to the land as quintessential 'Russian' qualities.¹⁷⁵ Moscow's students idolized Volkonsky. With his long white beard and hair, his sad, expressive face, 'pale and tender like the moon', he was regarded as a 'sort of Christ who had emerged from the Russian wilderness'.¹⁷⁶ A symbol of the democratic cause that had been interrupted by the oppressive regime of Nicholas I, Volkonsky was a living connection between the Decembrists and the Populists, who emerged as the people's champions in the 1860s and 1870s. Volkonsky himself remained true to the ideals of 1812. He continued to reject the values of the bureaucratic state and the aristocracy and, in the spirit of the Decembrists, he continued to uphold the civic obligation to live an honest life in the service of the people, who embodied the nation. 'You

9. Maria Volkonsky and her son Misha. Daguerreotype, 1862. Maria was suffering from a kidney disease and died a year later

know from experience,' he wrote to his son Misha (now serving in the army in the Amur region) in 1857,

that I have never tried to persuade you of my own political convictions -they belong to me. In your mother's scheme you were directed towards the governmental sphere, and I gave my blessing when you went into the service of the Fatherland and Tsar. But I always taught you to conduct yourself

without lordly airs when dealing with your comrades from a different class. You made your own way - without the patronage of your grandmother - and knowing that, my friend, will give me peace until the day when I go to my grave.¹⁷⁷

Volkonsky's notion of the Fatherland was intimately linked with his idea of the Tsar: he saw the sovereign as a symbol of Russia. Throughout his life he remained a monarchist - so much so indeed that when he heard about the death of Nicholas I, the Tsar who had sent him into exile thirty years before, Volkonsky broke down and cried like a child. 'Your father weeps all day', Maria wrote to Misha, 'it is already the third day and I don't know what to do with him.'¹⁷⁸ Perhaps Volkonsky was grieving for the man he had known as a boy. Or perhaps his death was a catharsis of the suffering he had endured in Siberia. But Volkonsky's tears were tears for Russia, too: he saw the Tsar as the Empire's single unifying force and was afraid for his country now that the Tsar was dead.

Volkonsky's trust in the Russian monarchy was not returned. The former exile was kept under almost constant police surveillance on the orders of the Tsar after his return from Siberia. He was refused the restoration of his princely title and his property. But what hurt him most was the government's refusal to return his medals from the war of 1812.* Thirty years of exile had not changed his love for Russia. He followed the Crimean War between 1853 and 1856 with obsessive interest and was deeply stirred by the heroism of the defenders at Sevastopol (among them the young Tolstoy). The old soldier (at the age of sixty-four) had even petitioned to join them as a humble private in the infantry, and it was only his wife's pleading that eventually

* Eventually, after several years of petitioning, the Tsar returned them in 1864. But other forms of recognition took longer. In 1822 the English artist George Dawe was commissioned to paint Volkonsky's portrait for the 'Gallery of Heroes' - 332: portraits of the military leaders of 1812. - in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. After the Decembrist uprising Volkonsky's portrait was removed, leaving a black square in the line-up of portraits. In 1903 Volkonsky's nephew, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Hermitage, petitioned Tsar Nicholas II to restore the picture to its rightful place. 'Yes, of course,' replied the Tsar, 'it was so long ago' (S. M. Volkonskii, O dekabristakh: po semeinum vospominaniiam (Moscow, 1994), p. 87).

dissuaded him. He saw the war as a return to the spirit of 1812, and he was convinced that Russia would again be victorious against the French.¹⁷⁹

It was not. Yet Russia's defeat made more likely Volkonsky's second hope: the emancipation of the serfs. The