Tolstoi inherited from his father an almost bankrupt estate, and as, after satisfying his father’s creditors to the uttermost farthing, he found it impossible to subsist on his scanty pay, he resorted to the time-honoured family practice of marrying a heiress, a lady of few personal charms but great wealth, considerably older than himself, Maria Ivanovna Volkhonskaya. Nevertheless this mariage de convenance proved an extremely happy though not a very lasting union, Tolstoi losing his mother when he was only three years of age (she died in 1831) and his father six years later. If, as is commonly supposed, Tolstoi’s mother was the original of the Princess Maria in “War and Peace,” she must, young as he was at the time of her death, have made a deep impression upon him. He describes her as of a tender, plaintive, mystical nature, of such finely woven texture as scarce to seem to belong to this world, one of those heroines of self-sacrifice who live not for themselves and “who do not so much die as fly to Heaven.” One precious gift she possessed, moreover, which her son certainly inherited from her, the gift of inventing tales and stories which held her hearers spellbound. It is said that when she was in a ballroom she quickly gathered round her a bevy of curious damsels who forgot their partners and everything else as they listened spellbound to the stories of the Princess Volkhonskaya.
Tolstoi’s earliest reminiscences have thus been recorded by himself in a work published eight years ago. Perhaps no other great writer’s memory has ever been able to travel so far back.
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